A second take on 'ghost' authorship
Nature Biotechnology's May Editorial (26, 476; 2008) adds its perspective to previous discussion in Nature, Spoonful of Medicine (the blog of Nature Medicine) and at Nature Network about 'ghost authors' on clinical research papers from Merck. According to Nature Biotechnology, papers from the pharmaceutical industry are being unfairly stigmatized because of one company's past poor publishing practices. Nature Biotechnology welcomes some recommendations made in an Editorial about the affair in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (299, 1833–1835; 2008), such as conflict of interest and 'author contribution' statements, but goes on to add: "the JAMA editorial then goes too far, leaping on the findings to make recommendations that are unwarranted, not to say discriminatory, against the body corporate. In recommendation 4, for example, the editors imply that any research associated with "industry" is potentially tainted. In essence, the editorial calls for journal editors to take into account all financial support and financial relationships when deciding whether to publish a manuscript at all." After providing additional examples, the Nature Biotechnology Editorial concludes:
"Ghostwriting and guest authorship run contrary to the Corinthian spirit of scientific publishing. Although that spirit may have disappeared since the days when science was the exclusive province of the enthusiastic and moneyed amateur, companies that use ghostwriters and rubber-stamp experts as authors of their papers reinforce the impression that industry's only interest in publishing is to dress up marketing as science. But the editors of JAMA and other journals would do well to focus on content, not process. JAMA's attack casts a cloud over the entire industry. Stigmatizing any paper that comes from the private sector on the basis of an analysis of one company's poor publishing practices over five years ago is not only unjustified, it is discrimination pure and simple."