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Ghost Writers in the Sky

Received February 23, 2009; accepted for publication February 23, 2009; first published online in THE ONCOLOGIST Express on March 13, 2009.

Disclosures: Bruce A. Chabner:Employment/leadership position: Partners HealthCare; Intellectual property rights/inventor/patent holder: Trimetrexate; Ownership interest: Zeltia (PharmaMar), Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Epizyme, Cougar, Curis, Aptium.

The content of this article has been reviewed by independent peer reviewers to ensure that it is balanced, objective, and free from commercial bias. No financial relationships relevant to the content of this article have been disclosed by the independent peer reviewers.

"Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride. Trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies" [¹].

Lately The Oncologist has received a spate of articles written with the assistance of paid medical writers, "ghost" writers if you will, who are not recognized in the authorship byline, but who contribute in variable degrees to the final product. These writers are usually recorded in an acknowledgment and their support from a pharmaceutical company may be identified, but their role in producing the intellectual product is often unclear. In some cases, once we have asked for clarification of a writer's role, or during the course of revising the manuscript, it becomes apparent that his or her role is predominant. We have seen revisions that have been made and transmitted by ghost writers, and not the authors. Indeed, the role of the named authors at times seems incidental, as the ghost writers have taken over the project.

It's reminiscent of the American folksong composer Stan Jones, when he wrote his famous Ghost Riders in the Sky [¹], only here we have "Ghost Writers" who chase illusory manuscripts in the orbit of publication.

For a peer-reviewed journal such as ours, this situation presents both practical and ethical problems.

The practical problem is simple: in some cases we have had great difficulty engaging the authors. In one recent instance, a stream of revisions was submitted to our editorial office by the "ghost writer" after publication of a peer-reviewed paper; the author seemed only belatedly aware of and not interested in taking responsibility for the mistakes that required revisions to the already published text.

There is, however, an even more important ethical problem. All peer-reviewed journals strive to present unbiased articles to their readership. We assume that the author has written the paper, and takes full responsibility for its content. Our readers should know when the material they are reading was written by a "hired gun," rather than by the author(s) identified in the byline. Thus, we do not accept the option that a paper may be ghost written and then placed in the peer-reviewed literature by using the name of academic oncologists.

We are particularly concerned about the participation of ghost writers in review articles, which are intended to analyze and bring their perspective to a discussion of treatments. These articles are likely to influence the direction of new investigation as well as the practice of oncology. It is critical that such articles represent the unbiased views of the authors, and not those of a ghost writer or a drug's sponsor.

We do, however, recognize that primary reports of clinical trials are often designed and executed in close collaboration with industrial sponsors, and therefore should rightly include the company participants as authors. The reporting of these trials may be assisted by a professional writer hired by the company to organize and expedite the submission of a manuscript. Thus, we acknowledge the distinction between a scholarly review and the reporting of a company-sponsored clinical trial. In both types of articles, the review and the primary report of a trial, each author's contribution in the paper should be clarified in the byline, medical writers should be recognized in the acknowledgments, and all authors should accept responsibility for the paper's content, its submission for publication, and its revisions.

Therefore, we have agreed on the following policy.

For the monthly issues of The Oncologist, we will accept papers for review only if the article was written, endorsed, and proffered for publication by the authors identified in the byline. The authors must attest that this is their creation for which they take full responsibility. If a paid writer participates in the writing of the article, the nature of that assistance must be clearly identified in the acknowledgment, and the source of support for that writer must also be stated. If the support for the ghost writer comes directly or indirectly from a party with a commercial interest in the content, and the hired writer has had the primary responsibility for writing and submitting the paper, but is not identified as an author, we will not accept the article for review or publication. If a company employee participates in designing and executing a clinical trial and participates in the writing of a paper, their authorship is not only acceptable, it is necessary. We will correspond with authors of the paper, but not with hired writers who are not recorded as authors. We will also not accept review articles for publication in our regular monthly issues if they are written by a ghost writer paid directly or indirectly by a drug sponsor.

We will continue to publish supplements to the journal that are supported by commercial interests, written by contracted writers, and submitted by academic authors, but only with full disclosure of the role and source of support of the paid writers. These supplements will be subjected to the same stringent peer review that is applied to articles in our monthly issues.

Our editorial board believes that transparency of authorship must be complete if our readers are to judge the content of our published manuscripts on their full merit. We all recognize the important role of commercial interests in bringing forward new drugs and in supporting clinical research, but we strongly believe that the results of that research should be presented in a completely unbiased and transparent way.

No more Ghost Writers in the Sky.

Bruce A. Chabner

	FOOTNOTES

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¹ "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend," Stan Jones, 1948. The song is about a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hoofed cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the ghosts of damned cowboys. One mythical cowboy warns him that if he does not change his ways he will be doomed to join them as "Ghost riders," forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

This Article Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: theoncologist.2009-0031v1 14/3/199    most recent eLetters: Submit a response to this article Purchase Article View Shopping Cart Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when eLetters are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services E-mail this article link to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Reprints/Permissions Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Chabner, B. A. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Chabner, B. A.