Conflict disclosure plan dropped

The NIH will not require universities to create websites detailing researchers' financial ties.

Meredith Wadman

Francis Collins hailed it as a "new era of clarity and transparency in the management of financial conflicts of interest" (S. J. Rockey and F. S. Collins J. Am. Med. Assoc. 303, 2400–2402; 2010). But the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) may have spoken too soon when he described a new rule, proposed last year, that would require universities and medical schools to publicly disclose online any financial arrangements that they believe could unduly influence the work of their NIH-funded researchers.

Nature has learned that a cornerstone of that transparency drive — a series of publicly accessible websites detailing such financial conflicts — has now been dropped. "They have pulled the rug out from under this," says Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a consumer-protection organization based in Washington DC. "It greatly diminishes the amount of vigilance that the public can exercise over financially conflicted research being funded by the NIH." It will also make it more difficult for "scholars to study the effects of conflicts of interest in universities", adds Sheldon Krimsky, who studies science ethics at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.

The NIH's parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), proposed the new rule in May 2010, after congressional and media investigations revealed that prominent NIH grant recipients had failed to tell their universities or medical schools about lucrative payments from companies that may have influenced their government-funded research. The DHHS called the proposed websites "an important and significant new requirement to … underscore our commitment to fostering transparency, accountability, and public trust". Under the proposal, institutions with NIH-funded researchers would determine, grant by grant, if any financial conflicts existed for senior scientists on the grant. For example, these would include receiving consultancy fees, or holding shares in a company, "that could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct, or reporting" of the research. The institutions would post the details online, where they would stay for at least five years.

But a government official with knowledge of the ongoing negotiations on the rule says that the institutions will now be allowed to choose how to disclose this information, and will not be obliged to post it online. This is likely to make it much harder for members of the public to find these details, says Ned Feder, a senior staff scientist with the Project on Government Oversight. The watchdog group, based in Washington DC, wrote last month to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) urging that the website requirement be protected. The OMB must sign off on the finalized form of the rule before it is published.

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