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February's Edtiorial in Nature Medicine (14, 106; 2008) addresses the question of what we mean by 'perceived' conflicts of interest. The reader wrote: "This term crops up frequently in the editorials of Nature journals, and I would be extremely grateful if [...] you would like to explain the difference between a perceived and an actual conflict of interest."
The policy in full is described on our Author and Reviewers' website, but to summarize, perceived competing financial interests [CFIs] are instances in which no competing interest (or conflict) exists, but the potential for financial gain as a result of what is published could give readers the impression of a conflict.
An example given in the Editorial is the publication of sponsored content. "Producing, say, a supplement to Nature Medicine requires financial resources that may not be part of our budget. If we want to publish this content for the benefit of our readers, we must find the money elsewhere. A sponsor may be interested in the topic of the supplement and agree to underwrite the costs. To the casual reader, this may look like a CFI—either the sponsor directly paid for the content, or the journal published on this topic to get money from the sponsor. There is, however, no conflict, because our sponsors never have a say on the editorial content of anything we publish. In fact, all of the editorial content for supplements is often already commissioned before we approach potential sponsors." For Nature journals, all such content contains a clear statement by the editors, in order to be maximally clear.
We welcome readers' views about perceived and acutal interests, either in respect of sponsored content or other aspects of the publication process.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 07, 2008
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From The New York Times (19 Jan 2008): "The National Institutes of Health do almost nothing to monitor the financial conflicts of university professors to whom it provides grants, a government report found, and the huge federal research agency does not want to start now. The agency does not know the number of conflicts or the nature of them, nor does it track how universities and other institutions went about solving those conflicts, according to a report issued Friday by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services."
The article goes on to outline NIH's view that it would be impossible to monitor all their investigators for possible conflicts of interest; but as universities are increasingly being forced to seek funding from new sources, the problem is becoming unmanageable for them, also. According to the New York Times article, NIH investigators filed only 438 conflict-of-interest reports between 2004 and 2006, 89 per cent of which provided no details about the nature of the conflict being reported or how it was managed. Yet NIH awarded more than $23 billion last year to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities.
The Nature journals' policy on competing interests can be found at our author and reviewer website. It states: "competing interests are defined as those of a financial nature that, through their potential influence on behaviour or content or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication.
They can include any of the following:
Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Personal financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication."
See our author and reviewer website for more information.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 23, 2008
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Academic researchers have regularly ignored patents on key technologies as a strategy to maneuver around patent thickets and freedom-to-operate issues, but they may be more at risk than they realize, write Amy Yancey and C Neal Stewart, Jr of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the current issue of Nature Biotechnology (25, 1225-1228; 2007). From their article:
"The original proponents of patent protection could not have foreseen a world in which the very building blocks of life could be patented or farmers could be prevented from saving seeds from year to year, but our courts, regulators and political leaders are certainly aware of it now. Despite this fact, public policy solutions have been slow in materializing, and the problems may get worse before they improve. It may prove that no silver bullet exists, but with open-source solutions, pressure from open-science advocates like Richard Jefferson and open licensing from universities, anticommons effects can hopefully be avoided or minimized. In the interim, it seems prudent to conduct research on awareness of FTO issues among public university researchers, increase empirical evidence of the innovation-blocking effects of anticommons and patent thickets, evaluate the effectiveness of those organizations seeking to increase collaboration amount public institutions and create new workarounds."
For further advice, additional reading and references, read the full article at Nature Biotechnology's website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 16, 2007
Categories: Categories, Competing interests | Permalink | Comments (0)

Philip Ball's column in news@nature.com this week is about Richard Doll, and whether he should have stated in his publications that he received consultancy fees. The Nature journals' policy on competing interests is summarized here. As ever, we welcome comments from scientists about the practice of declaring such interests, whether financial, ethical or personal, in published papers. How relevant are any or all of these conflicts to the strength of the scientific conclusions reported in a peer-reviewed paper? In particular, we welcome feedback about our own policy, via comments to this post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 19, 2006
Categories: Competing interests, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)