Issues in science writing

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An essay in PLoS Medicine lays out an aggressive strategy for attacking ghostwriting abuses: Make everyone — including writers and scientists who lend their names and reputations to the ghostwritten articles — legally liable for resulting patient injuries: "Although guest authors and pharmaceutical defendants may argue a First Amendment right to participate in ghostwriting, the U.S. Supreme Court has firmly held that the First Amendment does not shield fraud."

Michael Eisen discusses a move in Congress to overturn a National Institutes of Health policy ensuring free access to results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research. "The policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce," Eisen writes. More comment from Michelle Clement on the Scientific American blog network.

A recently retired South Carolina reporter reappears in his old paper, writing a health column sponsored by a local hospital. "Red flags go up when we see a column written by a grateful former patient who is now being paid by the health care provider to whom he is grateful," writes Gary Schwitzer on healthnewsreview.org. "I’m not in Schwitzer’s camp on this one," Trudy Lieberman replies on the Columbia Journalism Review site.

Whether or not the Internet has enabled plagiarists, the subject remains murky. Salon convened a panel to debate where the lines are. From spy novelist Jeremy Duns: "I think if you were to make a film about a man trying to find another man, that’s not an idea that belongs to anyone. If you set it in the jungle, you might be unconsciously inspired by Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness.' That's fine too." But make one man a rogue colonel in wartime and you've got trouble.

David Crotty comments at the Scholarly Kitchen about a new journal's decision to put scientists, instead of editors, in charge of its publication. "Is there a factual basis, a measurable qualitative difference seen in the performance of the two types of editors?" Crotty asks. "Are professional editors inferior? Or are they being used as a scapegoat for rejected authors, the scholarly equivalent of blaming the referee when one’s local sports team loses a match?"

The British phone hacking inquiry may soon expand to science journalism, Curtis Brainard warns in CJR's The Observatory. An official board seems likely to examine coverage of the MMR vaccine, global warming and similar issues, Brainard writes: "Journalists should be open to and learn from reasonable criticism. But the emphasis there is on reasonable. In turning its gaze toward science journalism, the Leveson inquiry must take care not to become a witch hunt."

Its stated goal may be to prevent copyright and trademark infringement, but the Stop Online Piracy Act "would violate the constitutional rights of free speech and due process, and stifle innovation in the news business," the American Society of News Editors said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week, when the panel was expected to vote on it. The vote was delayed after ASNE and numerous Internet experts raised their concerns.

Travis Saunders writes on the Obesity Panacea blog about coverage of a study linking television to heart disease. The finding was noted in headlines around the world, Saunders notes, but then quotes a second study blaming video games, not television. "You might begin to question why these researchers can’t get their act together and figure out what’s actually going on, rather than making one claim and then following it up with a contradictory one," Saunders writes.

Did you know smoking can improve the performance of long-distance runners? If you saw this article by Kenneth A. Myers in the Canadian Medical Association Journal you might have wondered about its editing — especially if you skipped the abstract. Myers tried, Travis Saunders wrote on Obesity Panacea, "to illustrate how you can fashion a review article to support almost any crazy theory if you’re willing to cherry-pick the right data."