Conflicting interests involved in the process of publishing in biomedical journals

This short discussion on conflicting interests in publishing is designed to help all participants (authors, editors and peer reviewers) in the publication of biomedical papers. Authors who submit manuscripts to a journal are responsible for the overall quality and integrity of the paper. The main goal of the editor is to provide readers with the most relevant information by insuring proper presentation and interpretation of scientific data. The editor informs readers on potential conflicting interests of the authors to enable the reader to judge a paper in a more informative way. However, the editor must also consider potential conflicting interests of peer reviewers. If a peer reviewer has a potential conflicting interest in evaluating a manuscript, he/she should not accept the job of reviewing it. If the editor or any member of the executive board has a similar conflict of interest for an article under consideration, including an editorial for this journal, such persons should not participate in the vote to endorse the article, and the journal should publish a note to that effect. When an article is published in the local language for a "small scientific community," there is always a risk that peer review could reflect personal relationships and animosities. Blinding the reviewer to the author(s) might eliminate a reviewer's conflict of interests, but this is not always possible or even desirable. A better solution would be to have the journal publish all scientific articles in English. This would provide both wider readership and a larger group of international reviewers. To gain better reviewers, the journal staff could educate young local investigators by publishing educational articles. Advantages and disadvantages of publishing a statement on conflicting interests are discussed.