Pfizer bid for peer review papers falls flat

Drug company’s efforts to obtain confidential peer review documents from major US medical journal has been blocked

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) fought off Pfizer’s attempt to make it reveal the confidential documents although a judicial decision has yet to be made on a similar subpoena against the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis told IWR: “A promise of confidentiality to authors and reviewers is what allows the peer review process to work in the first place. Producing any of these documents ­ even after redacting the names of the peer reviewers ­ would compromise it.

“These subpoenas invade the sanctity of the peer review process, and we are pleased the judge said so when he ruled they could not be enforced.”

A Pfizer spokesperson said: “Subpoenas are a routine part of fact gathering in any US litigation by both plaintiffs and defendants. Pfizer’s requests for documents were limited in scope, and not aimed at the confidential aspects of the editorial deliberations of medical journals or the peer review process, such as individual review names.”

Pfizer demanded the documents to help it fight a legal action against its arthritis drugs Bextra and Celebrex. The documents relate to studies on the drugs that were published by NEJM.

Paul Shaw of law firm Brown Rudnick, which is representing NEJM, would not comment on the journal’s position prior to a court ruling.

In a memo to the court, NEJM opposes Pfizer’s attempt to “eviscerate the critical editorial and peer review processes on which medical research so heavily relies”.

The fear is that if Pfizer is successful against NEJM, it will scare off peer reviewers because they could no longer depend on confidentiality. Experts said it might be possible in specialist scientific communities to identify reviewers from a review even if their names were not revealed.

A recent report by the Publishing Research Consortium found that almost half of reviewers would be less likely to offer their services if their name was published or revealed to the author.

But critics of the peer review system have long called for more openness to prevent bias, and actions such as Pfizer’s may accelerate moves towards a more open model.

Linda Miller, US executive editor of Nature and the Nature research journals, welcomed the JAMA decision.

“People will be relieved at this outcome from the first case,” she said. However, Miller believes that more open models are on their way, despite a less than successful experiment carried out by Nature into open peer reviewing last year.

Adrian Mulligan, associate director at Elsevier, said: “If you had to reveal the identity of the peer reviewer, it would put into jeopardy the whole process for scientific literature. But the reviewer only advises the editor. The editor makes the final decision.”