Nature Adopts Stricter Financial Disclosure Policy
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), an association of commercial pharmaceutical companies, has developed a new set of principles to guide research. A June 30 press release stated: “In the Principles, the PhRMA companies commit to the timely communication of all meaningful results of clinical trials, whether those results are positive or negative.”
On June 2, Attorney General Eliot Spitz sued pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline for consumer fraud for failing to publish unfavorable findings from a clinical trial of depressed adolescents. Recent media focus on the lawsuit and related issues has underscored the need to monitor industry-sponsored research.
Recent articles and letters in the New York Times and Nature Neuroscience journal have raised questions about the financial disclosure policies of scientific journals, leading the Nature Publishing Group to amend its current policy to include authors of review articles, editors, and referees. Although the disclosure of potential conflicts of interest always has been required of authors submitting original research, it has not been a uniform policy of all journals to extend the requirement to other authors.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest called attention to the issue in a February 2002 letter, which was followed by an article by Frank van Kolfschooten in Nature in March 2002, and eventually covered in an August 3, 2003 New York Times article by Melody Petersen, entitled "Undisclosed Financial Ties Prompt Reproval of Doctor." The article describes the controversy surrounding a Nature review of experimental treatments for depression that drew fire from two scientists who took issue both with the journal and with the reviewer for not including a financial disclosure.
The reviewer, Charles Nemeroff, had chosen not to provide financial disclosure, despite having significant financial ties to drug companies, including the manufacturers of some medications mentioned in his review. Scientists Bernard Carroll and Robert Rubin contended that Nature should have standards requiring disclosure of all authors, and that Nemeroff should have disclosed obvious potential conflicts of interest, regardless of Nature's policies (which at the time did not require reviewers to provide disclosure).
Following the article, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed September 30 that commented on the particular significance of review authors providing disclosure, since they "purport to weigh the value of one therapy against another and are, by their very nature, opinionated."
In response, Nature Neuroscience has adopted a stricter policy for disclosure and addressed the topic in its October 2003 issue, publishing a number of letters (including Carroll and Rubin's letter and Nemeroff's response), an editorial, and a relevant book review. Nature Neuroscience editors acknowledged that review articles may create greater "scope for bias," adding that requiring financial disclosure of all authors serves to remove suspicion, which "threatens to undermine public trust, not simply in a particular paper or journal, but in the integrity of the scientific enterprise as a whole." However, they concluded by noting: "Journals cannot eliminate all tensions arising from commercialization of academic research, of course, and ultimately these issues must be resolved in the marketplace of ideas."
