… on whistleblowers in university sports.

It’s part of the College Sport Research Institute‘s annual conference, this year held at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

UD‘s excited that Sally Dear will be on the same panel.

Sally Dear, an adjunct professor at Binghamton, recently received an email from an administrator there. SUNY was firing her because of a “strategic reprioritization of resources across the university.”

Now they’ve hired her back.

Binghamton … reversed the firing of Sally Dear, the adjunct lecturer who taught human development for 11 years before being dismissed earlier this week. Dear believed she was dismissed because she spoke out against the basketball program. The university had cited fiscal reasons. But Dear received a letter Friday saying she would remain an adjunct, although in a different department, during the audit.

“How come they’re firing me due to budget cuts and a reconfiguring of the department and all of a sudden I’m being hired by another department?” Dear said.

Easy answer to that question if you understand the inner workings of university administrations.

SUNY’s engaging in what’s known as “Reverse Rereprioritization,” in which formerly reprioritized priorities are reversed, resulting in rereprioritization.

Reed College graduate Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche ’16.

Click on his graduation photograph to see his laurels.

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May he live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

A reader writes, in response to Jonathan Leo’s essay about ghostwriting (go here for a link to the original essay):

Oh dear. That article is not very well researched, is it? They mention the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) as sanctioning the practice of thanking writers for “editorial assistance”. I take it they haven’t actually read EMWA’s guidelines on the subject, since they have totally misrepresented EMWA’s position, and also fail to cite EMWA’s guidelines in their references list.

Here’s what the EMWA guidelines actually say about “editorial assistance”:

“Vague acknowledgements of the medical writer’s role, such as ‘providing editorial assistance’ should be avoided as they are open to a wide variety of interpretations.”

Anyone who wants to read EMWA’s guidelines can find them here:
http://www.emwa.org/Mum/EMWAguidelines.pdf

Leo et al also use a rather idiosyncratic definition of ghostwriting. Most people would consider a ghostwriter to be someone who is not acknowledged, not someone whose role is transparently declared. Whether medical writers should be listed as authors is a legitimate matter for debate, but the debate is not helped by writing such an emotive and badly researched article.

(Conflict of interest declaration: I was one of the authors of EMWA’s guidelines)

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Jonathan Leo responds:

Scientific Papers with Unnamed Authors = Ghostwriting

We are happy that Adam has responded to our article as it gives us a chance to clarify a couple of issues, and to highlight one of the major points in our essay. Namely, that some groups in academic medicine are trying to find ways to allow the presence of unnamed authors to be involved with scientific papers – a practice which most people would call “ghostwriting.”

In his posting Adam says that we misrepresented the EMWA stance on the appropriateness of thanking editorial assistants and he cites the EMWA guidelines. However, when we mentioned the idea that the EMWA condones the practice of mentioning editorial assistants as a way around ghostwriting we did not have the 2005 EMWA guidelines in mind, but instead had Adam’s 2007 editorial in mind where he does sanction this practice. We should have been clearer in our essay about this. We did assume that when he wrote his editorial that he was speaking in behalf of the EMWA. If he was not, then we apologize.

Adam’s 2007 Editorial

The story behind his editorial starts back in 2006 when Charles Nemeroff and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Their review article concluded that a useful treatment for depression was a vagus nerve stimulator manufactured by Cybertronics. The journal Science discussed charges that the article in question was ghostwritten because one of the main authors of the paper, Sally Laden, was not mentioned in the byline. Laden was also paid by Cybertronics. Adam’s subsequent editorial was very critical of the Science article and took the same dismissive tone with Science that he has taken with our paper. He has also taken this dismissive tone in the comments section of the BMJ and PLoS Medicine. In his editorial he never argued about the facts behind the Vagus nerve paper, Laden’s role, or who her employer was. The major point of his editorial was that the paper should not be labeled as ghostwritten because Sally Laden was mentioned in the acknowledgement section, and this is why we mentioned the EMWA. In his defense of Laden’s role he says:

“In fact, Ms Laden’s role, and the fact that the authors maintained final control over the content, were reported in the Acknowledgements section in these words [3]: ‘We thank Sally Laden for editorial support in developing early drafts of this manuscript. We maintained complete control over the direction and content of the paper. Preparation of this report was supported by an unrestricted grant from Cyberonics, Inc.’”

And just last year in a discussion about the most famous ghostwritten paper of all time, Study 329, Adam again used the “editorial assistance excuse.” In his words, “It’s also not accurate to describe this as a ghostwritten article, as I see that Sally Laden was acknowledged in the published version.” Yet, in this article, Laden was simply acknowledged for her editorial assistance. Our take is that Sally Laden should have been listed in the author byline of both the Nemeroff paper and Study 329. This is not really a very profound, or earth-shattering idea, nor do we think it solves the major problems in medicine with undeclared conflicts of interest. It just seems to be simple common sense.

EMWA Guidelines

We are glad that Adam has brought up the guidelines and we are happy to address those here. At one point in the EMWA guidelines they say, “The involvement of medical writers and their source of funding should be acknowledged. Identifying the writer, either as an author or contributor or in the acknowledgements section.” To us this seems to suggest that EMWA believes that mentioning editorial assistance in the acknowledgment section is considered acceptable. Later in the document, they do say, “Vague acknowledgements of the medical writer’s role, such as ‘providing editorial assistance’ should be avoided as they are open to a wide variety of interpretations” but it is important to point out that the EWMA is still trying to find a way to have unnamed authors on papers. Instead of using the term “editorial assistance” they are simply proposing another term. In their words: “We suggest wording such as ‘We thank Dr Jane Doe who provided medical writing services on behalf of XYZ Pharmaceuticals Ltd’.” However simply changing the term of “editorial assistance” to “medical writer” is just another way to keep deserving authors off the byline.

The acknowledgement section is traditionally seen as a spot to mention people who don’t rise to the level of “author” – for instance, colleagues who looked at the paper and made comments, a grammar guru who tweaked the composition, or Mom and Dad who provided the necessary motivation. The EWMA seems to be doing their best to figure out a way to include deserving authors in the acknowledgement section – something we have previously referred to as “an academic sleight of hand.” It is not that we are against the term “editorial assistance,” it is that we are against leaving a deserving author out of the byline. Keeping them in the acknowledgement section but calling them something else is just a way to sanction ghostwriting. What we should have said in our paper is that simply mentioning authors in the acknowledgement section as editorial assistants or medical writers or any other term is not a solution.

Legitimizing Ghosts

At the end of Adam’s posting he says that whether medical writers should be listed as authors is a legitimate debate, but why should this be considered a legitimate debate? If academic medicine allows papers to have unnamed authors, as Adam is saying, then they are sanction ghostwriting. Shouldn’t the ICJME just require that writers of papers be listed as authors? We did point out that we think ICJME has a loophole that can allow ghostwriting, but we don’t think their intention is to condone the use of unnamed authors, and we don’t think they are debating whether this should be allowed.

The Twilight Zone

This is a very weird discussion. It seems to us that we are the ones calling for increased recognition for a group of very bright and skillful people. Rather than be hidden in the shadows we think that their skills and intelligence should be given the credit they deserve by rising to the level of authors. Medical writers do provide a very valuable service and there is no reason they should not be used but why not list them as authors? Sally Laden is surely one of the brightest and most prolific people in the scientific literature yet a pub med search would not reveal this. Yet, for our efforts, this group’s spokesperson attacks us on the basis that his group is not deserving of this credit. Welcome to the world of academic medicine. Adam has taken on the task of attacking anyone in the medical literature who suggests that writers should be called authors. But he seems to be leading his organization down a path that we are not sure his constituency wants to follow. If he is not careful his organization is going to become the EMGWA -The European Medical Ghost Writers Association.