Peer-review of work by "interested parties"
At Nautilus, the blog for authors, I've posted about competing interest statements in scientific papers. I've asked there what scientists think of this practice as authors. But what about when the scientists are peer-reviewers? Does it make a difference to you, when you are reviewing a paper, to know that the author has taken out a patent on the discovery or has shares in a spinoff company? Do peer-reviewers judge the scientific results independently of these declarations, or does it make a difference to the level of scrutiny they apply to the work? The Nature journal editors would like to hear about the reviewers' perspective, via your comments to this post.