Unifying journal disclosure rules

Written byBob Grant

| 2 min read

A science watchdog group has created a model conflict of interest disclosure linkurl:policy;http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/20080711_a_common_standard_for_conflict_of_interest_disclosure__final_for_conference.pdf that it hopes will be widely accepted by the editors of scientific and medical journals. linkurl:The Center for Science in the Public Interest;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24056/ (CSPI) unveiled the policy last week in advance of its linkurl:"Rejuvenating public sector science";http://cspinet.org/integrity/conflictedscience_conf.html conference, held in Washington, DC on Friday (July 11). The disclosure guidelines constitute a roadmap to uncovering financial and non-financial linkurl:conflicts of interest;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24445/ 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 linkurl:Arthur Caplan;http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/01/01/s74/1/ and linkurl:Jonathan Moreno;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22276/ 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 linkurl:Committee on Publication Ethics;http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/ (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 linkurl:disclosure;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/21640/ 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 linkurl:written;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/daily/53318/ for __The Scientist__ in the past.)__

Meet the Author

Bob Grant

From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.

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Unifying journal disclosure rules

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