Opening Pandora’s box: the public declaration of competing interests

The authors are on the editorial team of Open Medicine. T o ensure the credibility of research findings and to maintain public trust in the research process, it is critical that research be conducted transparently. Consideration of how financial, institutional and personal interests influence how research is designed, conducted and published is an increasingly important part of this transparency. Conflict of interest exists when a researcher's private interests (competing interests) diverge from his or her responsibilities to the conduct of a research study and the publication of the results. 1 Unfortunately, these competing interests are often not recognized 2 or declared 3–4 ; the suspicion that there may be undeclared competing interests has the potential to undermine public confidence in medical science. Open Medicine is delighted to publish a conflict of interest checklist by Rochon and colleagues 5 that provides a structured approach to considering and documenting potential competing interests through the entire research process, from study inception to publication. Designed to be completed by each investigator, irrespective of his or her role in the study, the checklist also provides, for the first time, a single comprehensive document that stakeholders with a role in a project's adjudication or evaluation—members of research ethics boards and funding bodies, journal editors and readers—can use to review and interpret researchers' competing interests and respond if necessary. A critical benefit of the checklist is that it also provides a record that can be held in the public domain for scrutiny and evaluation over the course of a research project and for future reference. We believe that the checklist has two key strengths: the process undertaken to develop it 6 and its broad scope. The checklist was developed in three phases. First, the research team drafted initial checklist items on the basis of published literature on competing interests, and two drafts of the checklist were reviewed by 29 and 24 reviewers , respectively, drawn from 3 groups (18 experts, 12 team members and 4 research staff). In the second phase, a third draft was discussed by 28 participants in a day-long, face-to-face meeting. In the third, " consolidation , " phase, further drafts were pilot-tested for usability. An example document was completed using a hypothetical research project, and an explanatory document and interactive PDF version were developed and reviewed at a second face-to-face meeting. The research team's receptivity to broad user input demonstrates a commendable commitment …