Dr. Bero,

Thank you for this important work. Clearly, as you mention, the impact of all conflicts are not equal, financial conflicts are much more likely to result in bias.

However, AIBS has recently published a case study of peer review panels (reviewing nearly 300 basic biomedical research applications) and found no financial conflicts were reported, despite our prompting in our forms to disclose such information. Perhaps there were no actual financial conflicts but it is quite difficult for our staff to check on this as financial info is typically not contained in a CV and websites like openpayments are more useful for checking on clinical researchers than basic ones. In addition, we noted that most non-financial conflicts that were detected were not self reported but found through manual checking by our staff, so there is likely under-reporting occurring. Our study can be found below:

http://link.springer.com/...

downloadable at:

https://figshare.com/arti...

Thank you for addressing this important topic. More standardization of reporting financial relationships is definitely merited.

Stephen Gallo
American Institute of Biological Sciences
Scientific Peer Advisory and Review Services