Disclosure policies and the epistemic corruption of biomedical research

Disclosure policies in biomedical journals require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest (COI), typically -but not exclusively- originating in the industry funding they receive for their research. The consensus among philosophers and sociologists studying COI is that disclosure policies are not working. This failure has been interpretated by pharma scholars as a telling sign of the corruption of biomedical research. But how could have disclosure policies worked? Using Bicchieri's theory of social norms, we are going to argue that for disclosing to work in correcting the adverse effects of COI, it would be necessary for the biomedical community to have a normative agreement about the corruptive effects of industry sponsorship. To reach this agreement, we argue, it is necessary to form a consensus on the public interest regarding pharmaceutical products, and how private funding would harm it. An analysis of Sismondo's account of the epistemic corruption of biomedical research will show how far biomedical communities are from reaching this consensus. It is therefore unsurprising that disclosure policies do not work. Yet, they are still defensible as disclaimers: imperfect warnings about the potential risks of industry sponsorship in a world in which there is no agreement on why the latter is pernicious.