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Table 3 Future development of the ICMJE Recommendations: suggested policies with respect to industry

From: The ICMJE Recommendations and pharmaceutical marketing – strengths, weaknesses and the unsolved problem of attribution in publication ethics

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 [2224].

• 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.