The director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has responded to a letter sent to him last fall by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a Washington- based watchdog group dedicated to exposing corruption.

The letter documented several cases in which NIH grantees appeared to have engaged in ghostwriting — publishing articles with substantial parts written by unacknowledged, industry-paid writers. The POGO letter closes by urging NIH director Francis Collins to “take a firm stance against ghostwriting” by making NIH funding contingent upon periodic certification from the institutions it funds that ghostwriting is strictly prohibited and that enforcement mechanisms such as disciplinary action and dismissal are in place.

POGO’s documentation prompted this Nature editorial, which also urges NIH to require the institutions which receive its funds to declare and enforce clear, high-profile bans on ghostwriting.

Now Collins, in this response to POGO’s Paul Thacker, dated 17 February but published by POGO today here, argues that ghostwriting can already be attacked through existing NIH rules on research misconduct, such as prohibitions on plagiarism and on fabrication. These are enforced by the Office of Research Integrity in the Department of Health and Human Services – and can lead to withdrawal of grant funding.

But Collins clearly does not see the agency as playing the ghostbuster role. “The NIH believes that ghostwriting should be addressed when scientific articles citing extramural Federal funding are submitted to journals for publication,” he writes.

He also notes that NIH is preparing to issue revamped rules governing the reporting of financial interests by its extramural grantees. By including “paid authorship” in the list of reportable financial interests under these revised rules, he writes, “the NIH is sending a clear message to institutions and investigators that we support the rules of transparency and accountability in research and that institutions and investigators engaging in such activity may be subject to more rigorous disclosure and reporting.”

Thacker, a former Senate investigator who is well-known as a thorn in the side of medical researchers with anything to hide (see this profile in Nature) responded perhaps predictably in an email today:

“What Collins is missing is that it doesn’t matter if someone is paid an honorarium to sign onto a ghostwritten article, or if they are not,” he wrote. “Publications are the currency in academia, and any help that a professor is provided in publishing is a type of reward. And corporations are not in the business of handing out money unless they feel it will benefit their bottom line. They can’t because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors.”

Stay tuned for the next development, which is likely to be the publication in coming weeks of NIH’s final, revamped rules on financial interest reporting.