Response: More on ghostbusting

Response

We appreciate the comments made by Dr Donovan and colleagues¹  at Envision Pharma (a medical communications company) responding to our recent editorial entitled, “Ghostbusting at Blood.” We want to clarify several points in response. First, we did not suggest that a review article (or any other manuscript) would be summarily rejected because of any involvement by an employee of a pharmaceutical company, but rather that a manuscript should be rejected because of undisclosed involvement. This is particularly pertinent if a drug discussed in the manuscript is a product associated with the company paying for the editorial, writing, or research assistance, because of real or perceived conflict of interest. Blood editors have a responsibility as part of the review process to identify these conflicts so that the readers can evaluate the merits of the scientific contribution without such confounding undisclosed factors. Transparency should be in place whether an author is from industry or academia. Second, no one disputes the important contributions made by talented scientists in industry. Indeed, we emphasized this point in our editorial. Productive collaborations between the two will only become more important in the future as the elucidation of the mechanism(s) of action and determination of clinical efficacy of new therapeutic agents are jointly studied. In our editorial, we distinguished between primary research articles carried out collaboratively between academia and industry, or by industry scientists, which are treated no differently from those without industry involvement, versus Review Articles or How I Treat pieces, which are designed to give readers broad and hopefully unbiased summaries and interpretations of the state of our understanding of a particular disease or therapeutic approach. Avoiding real or perceived bias in these articles is particularly important because they involve more subjective choices regarding which primary sources to discuss and synthesize. It is possible that a pharmaceutical company author would be appropriate for such an article based on his or her general experience, but it is unlikely that Blood would solicit or publish a review article from such an author or allow involvement of a company-sponsored medical communciations company on a topic that encompasses the use of a product marketed by that company. Third, we believe that requesting new data from industry or a university or any other source for an author to incorporate and interpret in a review article is one thing, but the provision of complete tables of complied data is another. Blood editors continue to welcome manuscripts from qualified authors that make novel and definitive contributions to the field with full disclosure of all people involved in the preparation. Our submission screens now include specific questions for disclosure of nonauthor involvement with manuscripts, and instructions for obtaining presubmission screening in any situations that could be problematic. By discussion and negotiation before submission and full review, we believe we can better ensure high-quality and unbiased articles for our readers.