Theme | Policies for discussion |
---|---|
General commercial guidance | • Develop specific section on commercial publications. • Encourage CONSORT to develop a specific commercial schedule. • Do not refer users to self-interested trade guidelines [22–24]. • Initiative to ban advocacy-based marketing in scholarly publications. |
Data sharing | • Full rights of access to study protocols, clinical study reports, deidentified patient data including clinical record forms. • Unrestricted freedom of data analysis, comparison and pooling. • Database access/analysis rights limited to bona fide academic research groups. |
Attribution | • Guidance on balanced attribution, ensuring conspicuity of lead contributors – including companies as corporate entities. • Guidance on author sequence, corporate authorship. • Cease ICMJE support for ghostwriting – all major contributors to studies/manuscripts, including writers, required to be coauthors. • Up-front reader notification of commercial projects (e.g. company named in title or as a lead author). • Role-based contributor listings, including company roles (instigation, finance, product marketing, data ownership). • Cross-media standard on attribution/labeling. • New NLM publication type – “Commercial”. • Work with NLM, CRediT initiative to develop new PubMed-listed categories of credit alongside author – including categories suitable for companies. |
Interest disclosures | • Financing company’s interests and author relationships identified in Abstract. • Online grid of all stakeholder interests including authors, contributors, companies and journal. • Initiative to establish public repositories for comprehensive author interest disclosures. |