{"id":41202,"date":"2018-01-24T18:29:42","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T17:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=41202"},"modified":"2018-01-25T10:58:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T09:58:21","slug":"richard-smith-the-hypocrisy-of-medical-journals-over-transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/01\/24\/richard-smith-the-hypocrisy-of-medical-journals-over-transparency\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Smith: The hypocrisy of medical journals over transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/richard_smith_2014.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-33037\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/richard_smith_2014-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"richard_smith_2014\" width=\"128\" height=\"128\" \/><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Medical journals generally favour transparency, but we\u2019ve recently discovered that when there\u2019s a trade-off between transparency and their financial interest they opt for the money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The International Committee of Medical Journals Editors, the Roman Curia of editors, wants all <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icmje.org\/icmje-recommendations.pdf\">clinical trials to be registered<\/a> and data to be shared. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is so keen on transparency that it has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/about-bmj\/resources-authors\/forms-policies-and-checklists\/transparency-policy\">transparency policy<\/a> and a declared \u201ccommitment to transparency.\u201d<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0It also supports the All Trials campaign, which asks that \u201cAll trials past and present should be registered, and the full methods and the results reported. We call on governments, regulators, and research bodies to implement measures to achieve this.\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lancet Infectious Disease<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> calls research transparency a \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/laninf\/article\/PIIS1473-3099(14)70786-8\/fulltext\">moral obligation<\/a>,\u201d <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">and the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">New England Journal of Medicine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> has said that \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMp1303960\">Transparency\u2026.is increasingly considered necessary to improving the quality of healthcare.<\/a>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We know that the commitment to transparency is less than complete in that most of the journals do not have open peer review and either don\u2019t allow scientific studies to be open access or have systems as Byzantine as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.healthsciencelive.com\/UK\/193038\">mobile phone contracts<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">making it easier to extract maximum payments from confused authors. But what we didn\u2019t know until this week is the hypocrisy in relation to studies funded by commercial organisations, usually pharmaceutical companies. Despite repeatedly calling on pharmaceutical companies to make all their clinical trial results fully available, they put a block in the way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Around 90% of high-impact medical journals will allow academic authors to pay a fee to have their studies open access using an CC-BY licence (which might be thought of as the licence for full open access); but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.healthsciencelive.com\/UK\/193038\">a new study shows<\/a> that only one of 23 journals with an impact factor over 15 that allows academic authors to publish with a CC-BY licence will offer the same privilege to authors of studies funded by commercial companies, including pharmaceutical companies.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The study gives details of the policy of the journals, and it found that they charged between $3000 and $5000 for open access, with two thirds of them charging $5000. Most of these journals also charge for subscriptions, allowing the double-dipping that has boosted the already substantial profits of many of these journals.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A CC-BY licence allows anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, adapt and make commercial use of the material, subject only to an attributing the original publication. There are also NC-BY (non-commercial) and ND-BY (no derivatives) licences, which do not allow posting a research paper on any commercial site, creating derivatives (for example, translations), or exposing content to text- and data-mining technologies. These licences create ambiguity, which inhibit use.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why then do the journals not allow commercially funded studies to publish open access with a CC-BY licence? Publishers are reluctant to give reasons, but some say it\u2019s for \u201cethical reasons.\u201d They fear that commercial companies might cite studies selectively. But this argument is unconvincing because it conflicts with the commitment to transparency, would apply as well to academics, can be done anyway with NC-BY and ND-BY licences, and fails to recognise that pharmaceutical companies are tightly regulated in a way that academics are not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The real reason is money. A CC-BY licence has the potential to undermine reprint sales, which have been extremely lucrative for publishers. Data on reprint sales are hard to come by, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/344\/bmj.e4212\">a 2012 study showed<\/a>, for example, that the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lancet<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in one year had 88 \u201chigh reprint sales\u201d ranging from 24 000 to 835 000 copies and the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u00a072 \u201chigh reprint sales\u201d ranging from 1000 to 526 000 copies.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The median order for the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lancet<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was \u00a3287 000 with the highest \u00a31.55 million, while for the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the median order was \u00a312 500 with the highest \u00a3132 000. (It\u2019s worth noting that the US journals, despite their enthusiasm for transparency, refused to release data, but the sales for the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">New England Journal of Medicine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> are likely to be even higher than for the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lancet<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.) What the study didn\u2019t disclose\u2014but I know\u2014is that the profit margin on reprint sales is high\u2014at around 80%. So the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lancet<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> by publishing one study and selling reprints for \u00a31.55 million made well over \u00a31m in profit. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, very much to its credit, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/359\/bmj.j4930\">has recently published its total income<\/a> (\u00a322.8m) and its income from product advertising (\u00a32.7m), commercial sponsorship (0), and reprints (\u00a3116 000).\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It also published the figures for the whole group (which confusingly is called <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">BMJ<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, while the journal is called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The BMJ):<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0total income was \u00a377.3m, and the reprint income was \u00a31.98m. No other journal has published these figures\u2014journals are far less transparent than listed for-profit companies. The figures show that reprints are no longer an important source of income for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, perhaps because of its aversion to commercially-funded research, and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The BMJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> could adopt a policy of allowing commercial companies a CC-BY licence without any serious impact on revenues.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What the BMJ figures do not show is profit, and reprints are very much more profitable than product advertising, which often involves high production costs. So the group as a whole might have its finances harmed by adopting a CC-BY licence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of these large reprint sales are to pharmaceutical companies. The companies use the reprints for promotion. We might like to think that doctors will be grateful for being given high-quality science from journals, but my suspicion is that few doctors read reprints. The aim is simply to associate your drug with a prestigious brand like the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">New England Journal of Medicine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reprint sales have probably declined since the introduction of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act in 2010 (the data from the BMJ support this conclusion), which requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose financial relationships with physicians, but reprint sales have been and continue to be a major source of profit to many medical journals. This is why they don\u2019t allow the CC-BY licence for pharmaceutical companies\u2014because they could then circulate their own reprints.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How should pharmaceutical companies respond? Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, suggested this week at the meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals that the companies simply mandate that their studies be published CC-BY\u2014as Wellcome, the Medical Research Council, and most public research funders do now. Journals will probably then have to cave in and allow publication with a CC-BY licence because they want to publish the research the companies fund as it accounts for about half of biomedical research\u2014and they want the open access fee.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em style=\"font-size: 1rem\"><strong>Richard Smith<\/strong>\u00a0was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Competing interest:<\/strong> RS was the editor of the BMJ and the chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group and has a pension from the BMA, the owners of the BMJ. He has been paid as the chair of OpenPhama <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/openpharma.blog\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">https:\/\/openpharma.blog\/<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which is encouraging pharmaceutical companies to promote innovation in scientific publishing. These are, however, my views not those of OpenPharma.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Medical journals generally favour transparency, but we\u2019ve recently discovered that when there\u2019s a trade-off between transparency and their financial interest they opt for the money. The International Committee of Medical [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/01\/24\/richard-smith-the-hypocrisy-of-medical-journals-over-transparency\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[955],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-richard-smith"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Richard Smith: The hypocrisy of medical journals over transparency - The BMJ<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/01\/24\/richard-smith-the-hypocrisy-of-medical-journals-over-transparency\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Richard Smith: The hypocrisy of medical journals over transparency - The BMJ\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Medical journals generally favour transparency, but we\u2019ve recently discovered that when there\u2019s a trade-off between transparency and their financial interest they opt for the money. 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