SKAPP Director David Michaels and SKAPP Planning Committee Member Sheldon Krimsky contributed chapters to the book Rescuing Science from Politics: Regulation and the Distortion of Scientific Research, edited by Wendy Wagner and Rena Steinzor (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Politicizing Peer Review
David Michaels’s chapter is entitled “Politicizing Peer Review: The Scientific Perspective.” (Click here for a PDF.) Peer review, according to Michaels, “is an important but limited mechanism for quality control within the scientific enterprise.” This mechanism is widely used to allocate limited research funding and to select and improve articles for publication in scientific journals’ limited space. In both cases, peer reviewers allocate scarce resources on the basis of characteristics such as originality and significance.
In recent years, peer reviewing has been adopted for a new context to which it is less well suited: evaluating analytical and synthetic documents prepared by governmental agencies, often in support of regulatory programs. Michaels warns that that this practice, while potentially useful in some cases, “is increasingly being invoked in a way that is likely to magnify the ability of parties with a financial interest in the outcome to intervene successfully in the process, to the detriment of the public good.”
Scientific institutions and organizations mounted widespread opposition to a proposed peer review policy from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would have significantly delayed the release of vast amounts of agency information important to public health and the environment; meanwhile, most trade associations gave it strong support. In the final peer review requirements, issued in December of 2004, the OMB deferred to the National Academy of Science and other critics on some points, but Michaels warns that the new requirements, “while less onerous than those originally proposed, will provide new and convenient opportunities for special interests to promote an antiregulatory agenda.”
Publication Bias, Data Ownership, and the Funding Effect in Science
Sheldon Krimsky’s chapter is entitled "Publication Bias, Data Ownership, and the Funding Effect in Science: Threats to the Integrity of Biomedical Research." (Click here for a PDF.) The normative structure of science, Krimsky explains, “includes a shared set of goals for uncovering the truths about the natural world, the recognition that science is a social activity that demands openness and transparency of claims and evidence, and the commitment to an epistemology that embodies a standard of empirical verifiability for certifying knowledge claims.”
Several violations to these norms are occurring in the field of biomedical science. Drug manufacturers have been found withholding clinical trial data that would have negative financial impacts, and journal editors can face a conflict of interest when deciding whether to print articles that raise doubts about a product manufactured by one of the journal’s advertisers. Research funded by a particular industry sometimes produces findings about that industry’s product’s safety that differ significantly from a wealth of non-industry-funded studies.
Krimsky recommends four changes to improve the integrity of drug science:
1. Guaranteeing the openness of all clinical trial data
2. Developing a firewall between the drug manufacturers and the drug testers
3. Establishing a national, comprehensive system of post-marketing drug evaluation
4. Mandating comprehensive and transparent disclosure policy for drug journals, clinical guidelines, and federal advisory committees.
Rescuing Science from Politics is available from Cambridge University Press and Amazon.com.
View a PDF of "Politicizing Peer Review"
View a PDF of "Publication Bias, Data Ownership, and the Funding Effect in Science"
Read more about Peer Review
Read a Baltimore Sun op-ed "Saving Science from Politicians" by Rescuing Science from Politics editors Wendy Wagner and Rena Steinzor
