Making Sense of Non-Financial Competing Interests

Imagine you’re a peer reviewer who’s received a request to referee a paper. The paper reports the results of a study using cell lines derived from an aborted fetus as a diagnostic tool in identifying certain viral infections. You are also a member of a religious organization morally opposed to fetal cell research. In your review, you raise questions about the study’s validity and methodology that might undermine the paper’s chance of publication. Imagine you’re an editor and you receive a paper from the scientist who supervised your postdoctoral fellowship. It’s been a couple of years since you left his lab, but he has supported your career and you have warm feelings toward him; plus you still join your former lab mates occasionally at their monthly pub night. You select sympathetic reviewers and you fight hard for the paper at the editorial meeting. These two scenarios reflect true ones; and each provides an example of how a personal interest might conflict with your responsibility to ensure the integrity of the publication process. Are such non-financial competing interests of less concern than commercial interests in the publication of research? Not if they disrupt honest reporting, fair review, and transparent publication. Non-financial competing interests (sometimes called “private interests”) can be personal, political, academic, ideological, or religious. Like financial interests, they can influence professional judgment. Much as we’d like to believe that the reporting and evaluation of research are always objective, there is substantial evidence to the contrary [1]. Like all human activity, academic research and scientific publishing are inherently subjective, imperfect, and prone to bias, corruption, and self-interest. Indeed, because professional affinities and rivalries, nepotism, scientific or technological competition, religious beliefs, and political or ideological views are often the fuels for our passions and for our careers, private competing interests are perhaps even more potent than financial ones. Furthermore, the very nature of academic and editorial work ensures that none of us are immune. Expertise in itself presents a kind of conflict of interest. Ask one of the top malarial researchers to declare her competing interests when reviewing a transmission modeling paper and she may say, “I am a direct competitor. Who could review this paper who was not?” But how detrimental are private interests to the publication process? And what kind of guidance is out there to make sense of non-financial competing interests?