Leveling sanctions against an author who fails to disclose financial interests by banning publication of his or her articles for some time period would only encourage that author to send his or her articles to another journal; it cleans our house by messing others. So what about all editors, or at least a group, such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, agreeing to share the information and jointly to ban the offending authors? Those who suggest this approach have not considered the risk of antitrust suits.

Embarrassing external whistleblowers can be blacklisted, but ethically dubious research is Too Big to Fail.

It only exists on the WSJ page, or in direct links to the article. It does not exist on Google.

They want their articles indexes on Google News for advertising revenues. Go to (almost) any article you want to read on WSJ, and type the headline into Google News, and you will get the full article, without a paywall.

By the way, DeAngelis is a pediatrician.

I think that the New England Journal of Medicine is quite a bit better.

“Is the unexpected spine shown by the BMJ a rare occasion for justified British flag-waving, Britons never never never shall be slaves of Big Pharma?”

I don’t mean to be harsh, but if I were a Briton, I’d still feel that we were slaves to the USA (e.g., policies allowing British citizens to be handed over to the CIA upon request). I’d also feel that it’d be reasonable to take Mr. Blair on an experiential tour through the old, unsavory, highly public forms of the British criminal justice system for that.

“My point concerned De Angelis’s ( & Fontarosa’s) motives, specifically that it was unlikely that they had been suborned by Forest, or by Pharma generally. I take it that you agree. I also agree strongly that it is wrong to blacklist a critic, or to attempt to silence him through a telephone call to his dean. That’s what I had in mind when I wrote “that is wrong”, but I could have made it clearer by spelling it out.”

De Angelis might have been attempting to suppress the publicization of wrongdoing for purely egotistical reasons; however (a) that in itself is reason for her to ‘seek career opportunities elsewhere’; (b) after somebody successfully asserts that sort of control, it’s childsplay for the next editor to continue that policy for money.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-05-27-stroke-depression_N.htm

There is possibility for harm. Leo and Lacasses were right to raise the issue in BMJ after they were rebuffed by JAMA. Journals are all to happy to point out failures of rivals. Maybe, JAMA is concerned that any osteopath or social worker could destroy a medical researcher’s career with letters to rival journals and ruin JAMA’s reputation in the process. The authors of the original study have publicly apologized for failure to disclose conflict of interest and have confirmed that drugs are not a superior treatment. But the strong arming by JAMA continues. Is there more to this story? Note that DeAngelis is a psychiatrist.

I think we disagree only on details. I think De Angelis is wrong here, but that on the issue of medical-industrial corruption, she and the JAMA editorial board have historically been on the right side. Also, I’m skeptical whether “the maintenance of [the parochial interests of JAMA] makes it easier for the pharmaceutical industry to exercise its clout hiding these kinds of things”. Phama isn’t that subtle. It’s like what Susanna says to the Contessa in Figaro: “He [the Count] doesn’t flatter women of my station. He offered to pay.”