Concerns and Remedies

Workshop

Wednesday May 4th, 2011 from 8:30 am to 5:15 pm

FLA (Classroom A), Flavelle House, 78 Queen’s Park Avenue,
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Recent controversies have raised concerns about the integrity of authorship in scientific publications, particularly when pharmaceutical corporations pay undisclosed ghostwriters to prepare journal articles to which academic experts lend their names.

Ghostwriting and its implications was the focus of an intensive one-day workshop, which brought together medical researchers, legal scholars, medical journal editors, academic administrators, clinicians, medical writers, bioethics experts, patient advocates, and a US congressional investigator. The workshop aimed at exploring the various implications for academia, medical research, clinical practice, and the legal system and to discuss remedies to curb or control the practice.

Speakers and commentators included Mario Biagioli, An-Wen Chan, Jocalyn Clark, Raymond Devries,  Bijan Esfandiari, Lorraine Ferris, Adriane Fugh-Berman, David Healy, David Korn, Linda Logdberg, Trudo Lemmens, Alastair Matheson, Leemon McHenry, David McKnight, Harriet Rosenberg, Sergio Sismondo, Simon Stern, Paul Thacker and Ross Upshur.

The event was sponsored by: the Centre for Ethics; the Centre for Innovation, Law and Policy; the Joint Centre for Bioethics; and the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, as well as by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on the Ethics of Biomedical Research.

Participation was free, and the audience was limited to 50 people. A limited number of places were available for students. 

In the News

The conference generated attention in the media: