Big Pharma Shaping Medical Literature Behind The Scenes ? Med. Journal Articl

"There are no straightforward solutions, short of large changes to the nature of medical publishing and/or research, changes that would effectively sequester pharmaceutical company funding from research and publishing [45] or from marketing [46]. Until such changes come about, at least we can hope for more awareness of and responsiveness to the issue...... "Universities and academic health centers should prohibit contracts that allow sponsors to draft, edit, or suppress articles, or that allow sponsors to keep data from authors; they should even prohibit sponsors from facilitating publication. Universities should also take disciplinary action against investigators who serve as authors on ghost-managed articles. Meanwhile, investigators need to be aware of the mechanisms of ghost management of work that goes under their names, and to refuse to participate. Perhaps they need to be more modest about how many articles they can publish, and more realistic about the amount of effort, legwork, and/or creativity it takes to publish an article.... fyi- janet ========================== http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/ journal.pmed.0040286&ct=1 Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry? Sergio Sismondo Funding: Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funder played no role in the decision to submit the article or in its preparation. Competing Interests: The author has d eclared that no competing interests exist. Citation: Sismondo S (2007) Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry? PLoS Med 4(9): e286 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040286 Published: September 25, 2007 Copyright: © 2007 Sergio Sismondo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abbreviations: CHC, Complete Healthcare Communications; CMD, Current Medical Directions; CRO, contract research organization; MECC, medical education and communication company Sergio Sismondo is at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: sismondo@queensu.ca See URL above for remainder of lenghty paper with its following subheadings: [] From Ghost Writing to Ghost Management [] How Common Is Ghost Management? [] A Benchmark Study "The most solid information available on ghost management comes from the work of David Healy and Dinah Cattell" [] MECCs (medical education and communication company)and Ghost Management: A Supply-Side Analysis [] Discussion [] References 51 [Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 27, 2007]

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