The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7331 p7
1/8 January 2005

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MPs hear how drug companies try to sway editors

Examples of ways in which pharmaceutical companies attempt to influence the editing of papers submitted to academic journals have been given to members of Parliament.

Giving evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee inquiry into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said that researchers might offer to submit a paper and mention that a sponsoring company would like to buy several hundred thousand reprints worth up to £1m if the paper were published.

“There is an implicit connection between the submission of a paper and the revenue that comes into a journal,” Dr Horton said. “Then at various stages after a paper has been submitted there may be interventions by either the authors or the sponsor to try to move the peer review process in a direction that is less critical.”

Dr Horton gave as an example an unnamed company which had threatened to withdraw a paper on a cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitor because it believed that the review process was over-critical. The company had stated that this would mean no reprint income for The Lancet. The company had stopped interfering after the paper’s authors had been told that the paper would be rejected unless the company backed off.

Dr Horton also criticised disease awareness campaigns, saying that they were really about selling drugs. He told the committee that, during the reviewing of a disease awareness paper submitted to Lancet Neurology, a communications company had sent an e-mail warning that “the more reviewing that is done on the papers, the less value the ultimate publication will have to Schering as the information on Schering’s products becomes more and more dilute”.

At the time, the company had been trying to negotiate the purchase of reprints of the paper.

After Dr Horton gave his evidence Schering spokeswoman Claudia Schmitt said: “Schering AG fully supports the peer review process and believe it adds value and context to the papers submitted. We regret that in the particular instance raised by Dr Horton a misunderstanding occurred between the communications agency we employed, The Lancet and Schering AG.”