Conflicts of interest (COIs) often arise in academic publishing. Such conflicts may cast doubt on the credibility of an academic source. Ethical standards in academic publishing exist to avoid and deal with conflicts of interest, and the field continues to develop new standards. Standards vary between journals and are unevenly applied. According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, "[a]uthors have a responsibility to evaluate the integrity, history, practices and reputation of the journals to which they submit manuscripts".
Conflicts of interest increase the likelihood of biases arising; they can harm the quality of research and the public good (even if disclosed). Conflicts of interest can involve research sponsors, authors, journals, journal staff, publishers, and peer reviewers.
Avoidance, disclosure, and tracking The avoidance of conflicts of interest and the changing of the structure of institutions to make them easier to avoid are frequently advocated for. Some institutional ethics policies ban academics from entering into specific types of COIs, for instance by prohibiting them from accepting gifts from companies connected with their work. Education in ethical COI management is also a tool for avoiding COI problems.
Disclosure of COIs has been debated since the 1980s; there is a general consensus favouring disclosure. There is also a view that COI concerns and some of the measures taken to reduce them are excessive.
Criticisms of disclosure policies include: authors disclosing COIs may feel pressured to present their research in a more biased manner to compensate; disclosure may discourage beneficial academic–industrial collaboration; disclosure may decrease public trust in research; researchers who have disclosed their COIs may feel license to behave immorally; disclosure may be taken as a sign of honesty or expertise and thus increase trust; some types of COI may be more likely than others to go unnoticed or unreported; awareness of a COI does not make people immune to being influenced by bias; generally, people do not sufficiently discount biased advice; disclosure discourages the judging of work purely on its merits; disclosure causes more intense scrutiny for wrongdoing.
While disclosure is widely favoured, other COI management measures have narrower support. Some publications hold the opinion that certain COIs disqualify people from certain research roles; for instance, that the testing of medicines should be done only by people who neither develop medicines nor are funded by their manufacturers.
Conflicts of interest have also been considered as a statistical factor confounding evidence, which must therefore be measured as accurately as possible and analysed, requiring machine-readable disclosure.
Codes of conduct Journals have individual ethics policies and codes of conduct; there are also some cross-journal voluntary standards.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) publishes Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals, and a list of journals that pledge to follow it. The guideline lays down detailed rules for conflict-of-interest declaration by authors. It also says; "All participants in the peer-review and publication process—not only authors but also peer reviewers, editors, and editorial board members of journals—must consider their conflicts of interest when fulfilling their roles in the process of article review and publication and must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest". These recommendations have been criticized and revised to remove loopholes allowing the non-disclosure of conflicts of interest.
The Council of Science Editors publishes a White Paper on publication ethics. Citing the ICMJE that "all participants in the peer-review and publication process must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest", it highly recommends COI disclosure for sponsors, authors, reviewers, journals, and editorial staff.
The Good Publication Practice (GPP) guidelines, covering industry-sponsored medical research, are published by the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) publishes a code of conduct stating, "[t]here must be clear definitions of conflicts of interest and processes for handling conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers, whether identified before or after publication".
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing is intended to separate legitimate journals from predatory publishers and defines a minimal standard; clear and clearly stated COI policies.
A 2009 US Institute of Medicine report on medical COIs states that conflict-of-interest policies should be judged on their proportionality, transparency, accountability, and fairness; they should be effective, efficient, and targeted, known and understood, clearly identify who is responsible for monitoring, enforcement, and amendment, and apply equally to everyone involved. Review by conflict-of-interest committees is also recommended, and the lack of transparency and COI declaration in developing COI guidelines criticized.
, journal COI policies often have no enforcement provisions. COI disclosure obligations have been legislated; one example of such legislation is the US Physician Payments Sunshine Act, but these laws do not apply specifically to journals.
COIs by agent COIs of journals Journals are often not transparent about their institutional COIs, and do not apply the same disclosure standards to themselves as they do to their authors. Four out of six major general medical journals that were contacted for a 2010 COI study refused to provide information about the proportion of their income that derived from advertisements, reprints, and industry-supported supplements, citing policies on non-disclosure of financial information.
Owners and governing bodies The owner of an academic journal has ultimate power over the hiring and firing of editorial staff; editors' interests in pleasing their employers conflict with some of their other editorial interests. Journals are also more likely to accept papers by authors who work for the journals' hosting institutions.
Some journals are owned by publishers. When journals print reviews of books published by their own publishers, they rarely () add COI disclosures. The publishers' interest in maximizing profit will often conflict with academic interests or ethical standards. In the case of closed-access publications, publishers' desire for high subscription income may conflict with an editorial desire for broader access and readership. There have been multiple mass resignations of editorial boards over such conflicts, which are often followed by the editorial board founding a new, non-profit journal to compete with their former one.
Some journals are owned by academic societies and professional organisations. Leading journals can be very profitable and there is often friction about revenue between the journal and the member society that owns it. Some academic societies and professional organisations are themselves funded by membership fees and/or donations. If the owners benefit financially from donations, the journal has a conflict between its financial interest in satisfying the donors—and therefore the owners—and its journalistic interests. Such COIs with industry donors have drawn criticism.
Reprints A reprint is a copy of an individual article that is printed and sold as a separate product by the journal or its publisher or agent. Reprints are often used in pharmaceutical marketing and other medical marketing of products to doctors. This gives journals an incentive to produce good marketing material. Journals sell reprints at very high profit margins, often around 70%, . A journal may sell a million dollars' worth of reprints of a single article if, for example, it is a large industry-funded clinical trial. The selling of reprints can bring in over 40% of a journal's income.
Impact factors, reputation, and subscriptions
If a journal is accused of managing COIs badly, its reputation is harmed.
The impact factor of a journal is often used to rate it, although this practice is widely criticized. A journal will generally want to increase its impact factor in hope of gaining more subscriptions, better submissions, and more prestige. As of 2010, industry-funded papers generally get cited more than others; this is probably due in part to industry-paid publicity.
Some journals engage in coercive citation, in which an editor forces an author to add extraneous citations to an article to inflate the impact factor of the journal in which the extraneous papers were published. A survey found that 86% of academics consider coercive citation unethical but 20% have experienced it. Journals appear to preferentially target younger authors and authors from non-English-speaking countries. Journals published by for-profit companies used coercive citation more than those published by university presses.
Journals may find it difficult to correct and retract erroneous papers after publication because of legal threats.
Advertising Many academic journals contain advertising. The portion of a journal's revenue coming from advertising varies widely, according to one small study, from over 50% to 1%. As of 2010, advertising revenues for academic journals are generally falling. A 1995 survey of North American journal editors found that 57% felt responsible for the honesty of the pharmaceutical advertisements they ran and 40% supported peer-review of such advertisements. An interest in increasing advertising revenue can conflict with interests in journalistic independence and truthfulness.
Sponsored supplements
As of 2002, some journals publish supplements that often either cover an industry-funded conference or are "symposia" on a given topic. These supplements are often subsidized by an external sponsor with a financial interest in the outcome of research in that field; for instance, a drug manufacturer or food industry group. Such supplements can have guest editors, are often not peer-reviewed to the same standard as the journal itself, and are more likely to use promotional language. Many journals do not publish sponsored supplements. Small-circulation journals are more likely to publish supplements than large, high-prestige journals. Indications that an article was published in a supplement may be fairly subtle; for instance, a letter "s" added to a page number.
The ICMJE code of conduct specifically addresses guest-editor COIs; "Editors should publish regular disclosure statements about potential conflicts of interests related to their own commitments and those of their journal staff. Guest editors should follow these same procedures." It also states that the usual journal editor must maintain full control and responsibility and that "Editing by the funding organization should not be permitted".
The US Food and Drug Administration states that supplement articles should not be used as medical-marketing reprints, but it had no legal authority to prohibit the practice.
Publishers Publishers may not be strongly motivated to ensure the quality of their journals. In the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine case, the printer Elsevier Australia put out six journal-like publications containing articles about drugs made by the Merck Group, which paid for and controlled the publications.
COIs of journal staff Personal conflicts of interest faced by journal staff are individual. If a person leaves the journal—unlike the COIs of journals as institutions—their personal COIs will go with them.