---
title: "Conflicts of interest in academic publishing"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_of_interest_in_academic_publishing"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:42:26.093387+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Owners and governing bodies ====
The owner of an academic journal has ultimate power over the hiring and firing of editorial staff; editors' interests in pleasing their employers conflict with some of their other editorial interests. Journals are also more likely to accept papers by authors who work for the journals' hosting institutions.
Some journals are owned by publishers. When journals print reviews of books published by their own publishers, they rarely (as of 2013) add COI disclosures. The publishers' interest in maximizing profit will often conflict with academic interests or ethical standards. In the case of closed-access publications, publishers' desire for high subscription income may conflict with an editorial desire for broader access and readership. There have been multiple mass resignations of editorial boards over such conflicts, which are often followed by the editorial board founding a new, non-profit journal to compete with their former one.
Some journals are owned by academic societies and professional organisations. Leading journals can be very profitable and there is often friction about revenue between the journal and the member society that owns it. Some academic societies and professional organisations are themselves funded by membership fees and/or donations. If the owners benefit financially from donations, the journal has a conflict between its financial interest in satisfying the donors—and therefore the owners—and its journalistic interests. Such COIs with industry donors have drawn criticism.

==== Reprints ====
A reprint is a copy of an individual article that is printed and sold as a separate product by the journal or its publisher or agent. Reprints are often used in pharmaceutical marketing and other medical marketing of products to doctors. This gives journals an incentive to produce good marketing material. Journals sell reprints at very high profit margins, often around 70%, as of 2010. A journal may sell a million dollars' worth of reprints of a single article if, for example, it is a large industry-funded clinical trial. The selling of reprints can bring in over 40% of a journal's income.

==== Impact factors, reputation, and subscriptions ====

If a journal is accused of managing COIs badly, its reputation is harmed.
The impact factor of a journal is often used to rate it, although this practice is widely criticized. A journal will generally want to increase its impact factor in hope of gaining more subscriptions, better submissions, and more prestige. As of 2010, industry-funded papers generally get cited more than others; this is probably due in part to industry-paid publicity. 
Some journals engage in coercive citation, in which an editor forces an author to add extraneous citations to an article to inflate the impact factor of the journal in which the extraneous papers were published. A survey found that 86% of academics consider coercive citation unethical but 20% have experienced it. Journals appear to preferentially target younger authors and authors from non-English-speaking countries. Journals published by for-profit companies used coercive citation more than those published by university presses.
Journals may find it difficult to correct and retract erroneous papers after publication because of legal threats.

==== Advertising ====
Many academic journals contain advertising. The portion of a journal's revenue coming from advertising varies widely, according to one small study, from over 50% to 1%. As of 2010, advertising revenues for academic journals are generally falling. A 1995 survey of North American journal editors found that 57% felt responsible for the honesty of the pharmaceutical advertisements they ran and 40% supported peer-review of such advertisements. An interest in increasing advertising revenue can conflict with interests in journalistic independence and truthfulness.

==== Sponsored supplements ====

As of 2002, some journals publish supplements that often either cover an industry-funded conference or are "symposia" on a given topic. These supplements are often subsidized by an external sponsor with a financial interest in the outcome of research in that field; for instance, a drug manufacturer or food industry group. Such supplements can have guest editors, are often not peer-reviewed to the same standard as the journal itself, and are more likely to use promotional language. Many journals do not publish sponsored supplements. Small-circulation journals are more likely to publish supplements than large, high-prestige journals. Indications that an article was published in a supplement may be fairly subtle; for instance, a letter "s" added to a page number.
The ICMJE code of conduct specifically addresses guest-editor COIs; "Editors should publish regular disclosure statements about potential conflicts of interests related to their own commitments and those of their journal staff. Guest editors should follow these same procedures." It also states that the usual journal editor must maintain full control and responsibility and that "Editing by the funding organization should not be permitted".
The US Food and Drug Administration states that supplement articles should not be used as medical-marketing reprints, but as of 2009 it had no legal authority to prohibit the practice.

==== Publishers ====
Publishers may not be strongly motivated to ensure the quality of their journals. In the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine case, the printer Elsevier Australia put out six journal-like publications containing articles about drugs made by the Merck Group, which paid for and controlled the publications.