Editors' Conflicts of Interest

I wonder if any publications or institutions have policies regarding conflict of interest by editors. Specifically, is it considered a conflict of interest for an editor to be on the speaker's bureau for one or more drug companies, or to serve as a paid consultant for a drug company regarding product development or marketing?

Thanks,
Mark Ebell
Deputy Editor, American Family Physician
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I would consider this to be a conflict. How would full disclosure be handled?

I have a related question: would it be a conflict to be the editor of a leading journal, the person in charge of the paper selection process at a major professional conference, and finally also the editor of a publication that reprints published abstracts/commentaries from journals within the same profession?

DJ Lawrence
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The ICMJE and COPE have policies that require that editors disclose potential conflicst of interest to readers. Paid consultancies and being on the speakers' bureau would seem a substantial conflict on the part of an editor if the journal cionsiders for publication material on the company's (or the competition's) products.

Christien Laine
Senior Deputy Editor, Annals of Internal Medicine

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And how about speaking that is industry funded without being on a speaker's bureau?

David Riley
Editor-in-Chief, Explore—The Journal of Science and Healing
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Our journal, Tobacco Control, requires that all senior editors provide a statement about potential competing interests on our website. See http://tc.bmjjournals.com/misc/echoice3.shtml Editors are asked to provide information whenever this needs updating. Information concerns sources of income, including "honoraria" (always a strange term in my bookit seems to imply "money (or things costing money) that is not really money" when it obviously IS money and not something somehow valueless and token) and membership of bodies with relevant policies concerning the subject matter of the journal. We recently had correspondence from someone insisting that two of us should declare receipt of NCI grants as a competing interest because we were publishing papers produced from work conducted under those grants. That struck me as absurd, given that the NCI had been acknowledged as a funding source.

I think it always comes down to that common law legal test of "would the ordinary person perceive it as a relevant competing interest."

Simon Chapman
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Significant conflicts of interest are not limited to associations with pharmaceutical and other medical materials companies. Authors and editors may benefit financially from assuming attitudes and policies from which grants might result. Ideological conflicts are also real and may affect editors' orientations, acceptance and rejection of papers, and editorial opinions.

Editors should also disclose journal and personal funding from ideological organizations such as religious (such as the Templeton Fund) and various sectarian and ideological medicine organizations (Fetzer, Osher, Samueli, Rosenthal, Laing, etc) that sponsor programs in sectarian systems ("alternative medicine").

Grants from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) should also be acknowledged in view of the selective orientation of that office's grants, actions, and unbalanced committees and councils.

W. Sampson, MD
Editor, The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine
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I think that institutions and publications on health topics need stronger legal statements related with ethical conflicts like those related with plagiarism or illegal use. The ICMJE and COPE have policies that require that editors disclose potential conflicts of interest to readers but we hear about that kind of problem more frequently than we would like and usually nobody take actions.

Rodolfo Soca pasaron
Director General
Revista "16 de Abril"
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