Twenty years after editorial behaviour that has been described by one observer as "absolutely outrageous," the journal at the heart of the affair has apologised to the doctors concerned.
In 1983 Dr Jon Tyson and colleagues, from the department of paediatrics at the University of Texas, published an analysis of the quality of therapeutic trials in perinatal medicine in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The authors concluded that the papers they looked at were often scientifically poor and that unless standards improved women and their babies would continue to be given useless or potentially harmful treatments.
In an accompanying editorial Joseph Garfunkel, editor of the journal at the time, welcomed the paper and endorsed the authors' findings that the quality of a publication's contents lie with the publication itself.
But six months after the Tyson paper first appeared it was published in full in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology without the authors' consent and was attacked in an accompanying editorial. In the following months the authors and others who wished to comment on the behaviour of the publication were denied the right of reply many times over.
Over the next 20 years observers campaigned for an apology from the journal for the way Dr Tyson and his colleagues were treated. However, it took two changes of editorship until their pleas reached the ears of the current editor, James Scott, for their demands to be met.
Iain Chalmers, editor of the web based James Lind Library, has pursued the matter for the last 20 years and is presenting the series of events as an example of bad editorial practice at the annual seminar of the Committee on Publication Ethics this week. He said, "To publish someone's paper without their permission, only to attack it, is absolutely outrageous. It needs to be made clear to editors that they can't get away with that kind of thing."
Dr Tyson, now professor of paediatrics and obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Texas, said in a communication to Professor Chalmers: "I recently received a telephone call from James Scott, the current editor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. On behalf of the journal he offered a cordial and sincere apology."