The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery has announced that it will ban authors who deliberately fail to disclose any conflicts of interests from publishing again in the journal for at least a year, in an effort to emphasise how important it considers full disclosure.
The journal's editor, Andrew Wechsler, who is also chairman of the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, United States, has decided that any authors who are found to have failed to disclose conflicts of interests will be barred from publishing in the journal for one to two years, depending on the seriousness of the failure.
The journal announced the measure after finding that authors of two papers published last year had failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest. In one case, it found that Dr Randall Wolf, a surgeon at the University of Cincinnati, had not fully disclosed the financial associations that he had with AtriCure, a company that makes a system to treat atrial fibrillation, which had shown favourable results in the paper.
Dr Wolf included with the paper that he authored a disclosure to the journal stating that he and two coauthors had received educational grants from AtriCure and that these grants were not used to fund the research, according to Dr Wechsler. In an article in the Wall Street Journal (28 December 2005) a journalist, David Armstrong, reported that Dr Wolf “has lucrative ties to AtriCure.”
He reported that an AtriCure filing in August 2005 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency responsible for administering federal securities laws in the US, reported that Dr Wolf owned 18 402 shares of company stock and had warrants or options to purchase 13 913 additional shares of stock. The AtriCure filing has been seen by the BMJ.
When the journalist alerted Dr Wechsler to the issue, he said that Dr Wolf had not disclosed his stock options with AtriCure when he submitted his study to the journal.
To deter authors from failing to disclose conflicts of interest, Dr Wechsler introduced a new form that asks authors specifically about a range of potential conflicts of interest, in addition to introducing the ban on publishing again in the journal. “Depending on the seriousness of the failure to disclose, authors won't be able to publish again in the journal for one to two years,” Dr Wechsler explained.
Dr Wolf was asked to comment, but no reply was received by the time the BMJ went to press.
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