PLoS Medicine's Advisory Group on Publication Ethics

I n March 2005, we announced the appointment of an external advisory committee " to advise us on individual cases for which we are concerned about competing interests or broader ethical questions " [1]. Two years on, what has the committee achieved and how has it helped to shape policies at the journal? The committee is a " virtual " one, with seven members in two countries— the United States and South Africa. When the PLoS Medicine editors have a case that presents us with an ethical dilemma, we submit anonymized details to the committee and ask for its advice. Committee members were chosen for their very broad expertise, not just in medical ethics but also in law, health policy, medical journalism and editing, clinical medicine, and clinical research. In response to our request for advice, the committee members share their opinions via a listserv, and then the committee chair presents a summary of the committee's advice to the editors. Since the committee was appointed, it has responded to ten queries. These queries can be divided into three broad themes: (1) competing interests; (2) preserving patient anonymity; and (3) the borderline between a research paper and a programmatic description. From its very fi rst issue, PLoS Medicine asked all authors to declare any competing interests (http:⁄⁄journals. plos.org/plosmedicine/competing. php), which we placed prominently alongside the authors' biographical information. Initially we allowed authors to acknowledge their funding sources at the end of the article. This policy meant that some authors would declare that " no competing interests exist, " and yet in the funding statement at the end of their article would state that they had received funding from pharmaceutical companies. We presented examples of such cases to the committee, which was unanimous in believing that authors are poor judges of what constitutes a competing interest and that we should revise our policy. We therefore implemented the committee's recommendations to: (1) make sure that competing interests and funding sources were declared together at the beginning of every article, and (2) ask authors to state what role the funder played in the submission and preparation of the article. Our policy regarding articles submitted spontaneously (rather than commissioned) for the Magazine section goes even further. If authors proposing a topic have competing interests that could reasonably be perceived as affecting their ability to write an objective Magazine piece, we will decline their article. We …