Open Medicine’s ghost and guest authorship policy

The authors are on the editorial team of Open Medicine. G host authorship occurs when someone makes a significant contribution to a manuscript without due acknowledgement of their role. Guest authorship , in contrast, occurs when an individual is named as an author of a manuscript when they do not meet authorship criteria. Both are disturbingly common. 1 The preliminary results of a recent survey of corresponding authors conducted by the editorial staff of JAMA found that over one-quarter of articles published in six major general medical journals in 2008 had guest authors (range by journal: 16%–39%) and nearly 10% had ghost authors (range by journal: 2%–11%). 1 The prevalence of guest authors and ghost authors was highest in Nature Medicine (39%) and New England Journal of Medicine (11%) respectively. Ghost and guest authorship are breaches of professional ethics. They violate readers' trust in scientific reporting and have the potential to distort medical literature. Editors and readers of medical journals need to be confident that all listed authors have indeed made substantial contributions and that no major contributors have gone unnamed. 2 Transparent and complete identification of contributors to research publication is essential to scientific integrity. This is particularly important in the context of manuscripts reporting on pharmaceutical trials with potential economic ramifications, since significant problems related to the use of ghost authorship have been reported in this area. 3 In the most pernicious examples, ghost authors , who may include professional writers, researchers and statisticians, are directly or indirectly employed by a pharmaceutical or medical device company to write a research protocol and manuscript, and a guest author who is respected in the field of research is paid to append his or her name to the manuscript and submit it to a medical journal for publication. 4 Open Medicine, like other medical journals, has instituted a ghost and guest authorship policy to promote ethical authorship practices. A key feature of our policy is the requirement that authors provide a contributor statement describing the specific contribution of each author and stating how each author meets the authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which Open Medicine endorses. 5 Open Medicine recognizes that professional medical writers make legitimate contributions to research publication and advocates for the routine and transparent disclosure of any and all professional writer involvement in manuscript preparation. The Journal's policy states that professional medical …