Cochrane's plans to update its COI policy

Esther12

Esther12

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
This thread has been split from here


It's after 5:30 on the last day of November, and there doesn't seem to have been any update to the Cochrane review. Edit - they added a new statement: https://www.s4me.info/threads/30th-nov-cochrane-have-not-approved-publication-of-the-larun-re‐submission-but-old-version-not-withdrawn-either.6990/

They have just published this, which seems of some relevance to us:

Cochrane's plans to update its COI policy: truth and fiction

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.ED000131/full

Lastly, we are aware of examples where author teams have clear non‐financial interests that have been an obstacle to achieving the necessary equipoise, leading to the potential for ‘spin’ or worse in reporting or interpreting the results of their reviews.
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In addition to conflicts relating directly to Cochrane Reviews, we will also consider those that relate to other Cochrane publications such as Editorials and Cochrane Clinical Answers. It may also be timely to consider how emerging initiatives such as Cochrane Crowd (crowd.cochrane.org) and Cochrane TaskExchange (taskexchange.cochrane.org) need to be incorporated within Cochrane's COI policies, given how the ‘micro‐tasks’ carried out by people contributing through these platforms may exercise an increasing influence on review production.
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Therefore, we want to be clear from the outset that this policy is about declaring all potentially relevant interests, not simply those that some arbitrary rules define as ‘conflicts’ requiring action.

Examples of issues we might want to address are:

  • Working as a health professional in an area that uses the intervention(s) of interest or any potential comparators

  • Participating in research that investigates the intervention(s) of interest or any potential comparators

  • Publishing any previous review or opinion piece addressing the intervention(s) of interest or any potential comparators

  • Having any other specific personal interest in the intervention(s) of interest or any potential comparators.
It may be necessary to institute some exclusions to authorship relating to non‐financial conflicts, but in the main we anticipate that clarity and transparency will be sufficient. Full disclosure of non‐financial conflicts should help to eliminate the need for guesswork on the part of Cochrane Review users, who would be fully aware of the author team's experiences and likely perspectives. To be clear, we do not regard having specialist knowledge and experience as undesirable and to be avoided – on the contrary, it is an important component of a review author team. But if all the authors are super‐specialists who have published widely on the intervention then one might be more sceptical about the conduct of the review even if they were free of financial conflicts. Equally, if the author team is entirely made up of systematic reviewers without specialist knowledge one might worry that important clinical implications could be missed. A COI policy providing clear and transparent expectations of the information required would also make it easier for editors and peer reviewers to be alert to potential biases in draft reviews, and also for authors to decide what they need to declare.
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Preventing avoidable risk of bias and the perception of bias in systematic reviews is a crucial part of Cochrane's commitment to assuring quality. It is timely to revisit and revise our financial COI policy and also to explore the challenging waters of non‐financial COIs.
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Esther12 said:
They have just published this, which seems of some relevance to us
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This Cochrane statement is very relevant to us, given the exercise review on the face of it would seem a prime example of their current approach getting it very wrong.

If Cochrane retract the exercise review and if they manage to get the conflict of interest policy right it will at least put moral pressure on NICE to get their similar failings sorted. But it is still hard to know how big an 'if' this is.
 
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Esther12 said:
It's after 5:30 on the last day of November, and there doesn't seem to have been any update to the Cochrane review.

They have just published this, which seems of some relevance to us (should this be in a new thread? A more general Cochrane thread? I don't know):

Cochrane's plans to update its COI policy: truth and fiction

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.ED000131/full
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I'd say it's a good move for the better on Cochrane's part, will be interesting to see how it plays out in reality.
 
Haven't read the statement yet, but even the title is revealing, about the internal processes within the organization.

The need to publish something with the words "truth and fiction" in the title, is what you do to stop harsh debate spinning out of control - instead of activily including people in the discussion from the start, and beeing open.
 
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