conflict of interest in journal articles: what's a press officer to do?
TRANSCRIPT
Conflict of interest in journal articles: what’s a press officer to do?MRC/Wellcome meeting June 2016 , London
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Dr Trish Groves [email protected] Twitter @trishedDirector of academic outreach, BMJEditor-in-chief BMJ Open, Honorary deputy editor The BMJ
Publishing company BMJ is a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association
Some revenue for BMJ (the company) comes from drug & devicemanufacturers through advertising, reprint sales, & sponsorship.The BMJ and BMJ Open are open access journals that charge author fees for accepted research. Annual bonus scheme is based on overall performance of BMJ.
I’m part of AllTrials, co-founded by Sense About Science, The BMJ, PLOS Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, James Lind Alliance
Competing interests
By no means ALL, but...
Academic biases matter too
Studies are open to scrutiny, pre- and post-publication and it’s possible to detect bias in:
• research questions• study methods• results• conclusions
Authors and reviewers declare conflicts of interest
So where should we draw the line?
“The governing principle has been that transparency is a panacea…but mounting experience and evidence tell us that we were only half right. This risk of bias is particularly important for clinical educational articles that are designed to guide patient care, when authors’ biases may be less visible to general medical readers.” The BMJ
Clinical education: zero tolerance on COIs
Chew M, Brizzell C, Abbasi K, Godlee F. Medical journals and industry ties. BMJ 2014; 349 :g7197
