Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Dermatology
Date Submitted: May 2, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: May 2, 2021 - May 9, 2021
Date Accepted: May 9, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 26, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The “throwaways”. Conflicts of interest in dermatology publications.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Dermatology journals, periodicals, editorials, and news magazines are influential resources that are not uniformly regulated and subject to influence from the pharmaceutical industry. This study evaluates industry payments to physician editorial board members of common dermatology publications, including “throwaway” publications.
Objective:
To characterize the extent and nature of industry payments to editorial board members of different dermatologic publications in order to ascertain differences in payments between different types of publications.
Methods:
A list of editorial board members was compiled from a collection of clinical dermatology publications received over a 3-month period. Data from the Open Payments database from 2013 to 2019 were collected and analysis of payments data was performed.
Results:
Ten publications were evaluated, and payments data for 466 physicians were analyzed. The total compensation across all years was $75,622,369.64. Consulting, services other than consulting, and travel/lodging payments comprised most of the payments. A faction of dermatologists received the majority of payments. The top payers were manufacturers of biologic medications. Payment amounts were higher for throwaway publications compared to peer-reviewed journals.
Conclusions:
Editorial board members of dermatology publications received substantial payments from the pharmaceutical industry. A minority of physicians receive the lion’s share of payments from industry. “Throwaway” publications have more financial conflict of interest than peer-reviewed journals. The impact of these conflicts of interest on patient care, physicians practice patterns, and patient perception of physicians is noteworthy.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.