Ethical and quasi-ethical issues in medical editing and publishing

The peer review system is a complex, delicately balanced, and dynamic system by which most new medical information is made known. The participants in the process - authors, reviewers, and editors - all have responsibilities to shoulder and rights that need to be protected. An ethical structure has evolved over time to accomplish these two goals. This paper discusses six of these ethical or quasi-ethical issues. Authorship is currently a contentious matter, in part because authors see it as a credit, whereas editors view it as responsibility. Conflict of interest, usually financial, which seems to be increasing with the growing commercialization of medicine, can undermine the credibility and integrity of publication. Confidentiality is an essential component of peer review to protect an author's creative work from exploitation or misappropriation and to protect reviewers from retribution. Redundant publication, publishing or attempting to publish essentially the same work more than once, is regarded seriously because it wastes a journal's resources, confuses later literature reviews, and depreciates the value of authorship. Advertising is a necessary fact of life for most medical journals, but safeguards must be in place to prevent its influencing editorial decisions. When fraud or plagiarism is alleged about something a journal has published, the journal is not equipped to undertake the kind of investigation needed, and should refer the matter to the institution that sponsored the research.