A science watchdog group has created a model conflict of interest disclosure policy that it hopes will be widely accepted by the editors of scientific and medical journals. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) unveiled the policy last week in advance of its "Rejuvenating public sector science" conference, held in Washington, DC on Friday (July 11).

The disclosure guidelines constitute a roadmap to uncovering financial and non-financial conflicts of interest and affiliations among manuscript authors, journal editors, and reviewers. The policy urges full disclosure of potentially compromising financial relationships held by authors up to three years prior to submitting a manuscript. Financial conflicts include direct employment or consultancies with private firms, travel grants or speaking fees, paid expert testimony, membership on advisory boards, pending or existing patents, and stock ownership. Non-financial conflicts, according to the policy, include membership in NGOs that may have a stake in a particular manuscript's publication.

Merrill Goozner the director of CSPI's Integrity in Science program and one of the authors of the policy, said that the guidelines were crafted in response to the inadequate, non-specific disclosure policies that appear in many journals' instructions to authors. Goozner said that some of these policies appear as single paragraphs amid longer guidelines regarding proper manuscript grammar and formatting. "That leaves [disclosure] to the author's discretion," he said. "That's not useful to the author, and could very well lead to embarrassment for the author and the journal editor."

Goozner wrote the policy in conjunction with University of Pennsylvania bioethicists Arthur Caplan and Jonathan Moreno and the editors of three journals - the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Addiction, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Goozner said that the editors of those three journals have agreed to adopt the disclosure guidelines and that he hopes editors at more journals will sign on. To that end, Goozner met with representatives from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a consortium of journal editors that seek to address issues of scientific integrity in science publication, last Saturday (July 12). Goozner said that his group is in negotiations with COPE, which counts all Elsevier journals as members, to marry the CSPI disclosure policy with the COPE's overall stance on publishing ethics. "They're going to take [the policy] into consideration as they revamp their publication conduct guidelines," he said.

Goozner also said that some editors have expressed a desire to modify the disclosure guidelines to better fit their journals, a proposition to which he said he is open. The important thing, Goozner said, was that disclosure policies provide sufficient guidance to manuscript authors so that they and their editors can avoid undisclosed conflicts. "By having a level of specificity in your policy," he said, "that allows people to know what constitutes a conflict of interest."

(In the spirit of full disclosure, Merrill Goozner has written for The Scientist in the past.)