BMJ Editor on Big Pharma

Over at Nature's newsblog there is a short article quoting Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the BMJ group, on the conflicts of interest in the publishing industry.  I don't really want to just copy the whole thing, so here are some of the interesting quotes -

Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the BMJ group, told a select committee of the UK Parliament that “We have to acknowledge that the publishing industry has a number of different revenue streams, one of which is the pharmaceutical industry.”

... 

“It has been said that journals are the marking arm of the pharma industry and that is not untrue; to a large extent that is true,” Godlee told the Science and Technology Select Committee.

The BMJ is, of course, the same journal that had a little bit of a "whoops" regarding their recent take down of the de-doctored Wakefield.  Since the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, I think it is good that an editor-in-chief of a large organization like the BMJ is openly talking about the conflicts of interest in the journal industry.

Go read the rest of the article here.