Conflict of Interest in Science Communication: More than a Financial Issue Report from Esteve Foundation Discussion Group, April 2009

A systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once (1). Up to 33% admit other questionable practices such as plagiarism, duplicate publication, undisclosed changes in pre-research protocols or dubious ethical behavior (1). There can be no doubt that discovered cases of research and publication misconduct represent a tip of an iceberg and many cases go unreported (2). Experienced biomedical journal editors are aware of a “rogues’ gallery” of major fraudsters, such as Schoen, Hwang, Sudbo, Poehlman, Singh, and Chandra (3-8). Much more common are the less dramatic, because more subtle but probably more dangerous, examples; these are more dangerous because they remain undiscovered so may feed into meta-analyses and guidelines. A seminar organized by the Esteve Foundation, held in Sitges in April 2009, concentrated on conflicts of interest (COI, sometimes also referred to as Competing Interests, CI), which underlie so much research and publication misconduct. All attendants of the meeting agreed that there were many sources of COI in the general process of scientific communication (Figure 1). The meeting was mainly focused on non-financial COI. Three introductory presentations highlighted some of the topics related to COI in the contemporary scientific publishing enterprise