PLoS Medicine

One of the more “interesting” experiences of my journalistic career was co-authoring an Op-Ed for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 on the lack of evidence for prostate cancer screening using the PSA test.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which PLoS Medicine, and other PLoS journals, are members, has recently released guidance for editors on the thorny topic of "research, audit and service evaluations". This guidance aims to help editors decide how to handle their journal's requirement for ethical review in relation to these types of studies. As outlined by COPE, most journals require that for any research involving human subjects, the study has been approved by a properly constituted ethics committee.

Panellists noted that the recent NIH public access policy emphasises free not open access. That is, the policy may lead to freely accessible publications (for which publishers or organisations may reap profits from charging authors a fee to deposit their manuscripts), but these will remain under restrictive licenses (thus limiting text-mining).

Just spotted an interesting letter in last week's Lancet discussing selective reporting of clinical trials. This may sound like something you've heard many times before (eg here) but in the Lancet letter the authors describe what happenned to trials for which the original protocols were posted on Lancet's own website.

The FDA’s recent proposal to allow drug companies to send doctors journal articles about off-label drug use has come under major fire over the last few months.