Climate skeptic’s fossil fuel funding puts spotlight on journal conflict policies

By David Malakoff
Science Magazine
Originally published February 22, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

“We’re concerned about the lack of transparency in science… and a possible ethical breach in not disclosing potential conflicts of interest in an area with important public policy implications,” says Kert Davies, Executive Director of the CIC in Alexandria, Virginia. (Soon’s work, he notes, is routinely cited by politicians opposed to government action on climate, and widely disputed by mainstream climate researchers.)

Davies, a former Greenpeace staffer, helped spur the effort to use the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain the documents that detail Soon’s funding sources. The law applies to the Smithsonian because it is a quasi-government entity (it operates the CfA in cooperation with the Harvard College Observatory). Greenpeace has been using such FOIA requests to document Soon’s sources of funding for years. Last week, Davies began providing recently-obtained documents to media outlets, including ScienceInsider,  leading to stories in the New York Times, Nature, The Guardian, the Boston Globe, and Inside Climate News.

The entire article is here.

Ghostwritten medical articles called fraud

CBC News

It's fraudulent for academics to give their names to medical articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical industry writers, say two Canadian law professors who call for potential legal sanctions.

Studies suggest that industry-driven drug trials and industry-sponsored publications are more likely to downplay a drug's harms and exaggerate a drug's virtues, said Trudo Lemmens, a law professor at the University of Toronto. The integrity of medical research is also harmed by ghostwritten articles, he said.

Ghostwriting is part of marketing that can distort the evidence on a drug, Lemmens said. Industry authors are concealed to insert marketing messages and academic experts are recruited as "guest" authors to lend credibility despite not fulfilling criteria for authorship, such as participating in the design of the study, gathering data, analyzing the results and writing up of the findings.

Class actions involving drugs such as Vioxx, hormone replacement therapy and antidepressants suggest guest authors often fail to meet criteria for authorship, according to the policy paper in Tuesday's issue of Public Library of Science's journal PloS Medicine.

In the article, Lemmens and his colleague Prof. Simon Stern argue that legal remedies are needed for medical ghostwriting since medical journals, academic institutions and professional disciplinary bodies haven't succeeded in enforcing sanctions against the practice.

The institutions have divided loyalties, the authors say, which may explain why they've been slow to act. For example, universities wish to protect academic integrity while also protecting their employees from unjust accusation.

A legal response could act as a powerful deterrent, Stern said.

"Our theory does not depend on the accuracy of the data," Lemmens said in an email. "False representation of authorship is in our view fraud, regardless of the accuracy of the reporting."

Doctors and patients perceive published studies to be independent assessments made by academic experts, the authors noted.

Ghostwritten publications are used in court to support a manufacturer's arguments about a drug's safety and effectiveness, and academic experts who appear as witnesses for pharmaceutical and medical device companies also boost their credibility with the publications on their CV, Lemmens said.

The entire story can be found here.