Abstract
Should the JRSM publish only authors who declare themselves free of commercial interests? Mark Wilson rightly recognizes that simple declaration of commercial interests is no panacea. As usual, the devil is in the details. The JRSM must ask what it hopes to achieve beyond financial sustainability that might be threatened if it were to ban from its pages authors with commercial interests. Instead, why should the JRSM not advance the cause of bona fide empirical science by publishing the reports of all and sundry, regardless of their commercial interests, subject to the pledge and actual delivery of anonymised raw data on which the report depends for internal and external validity? Commercial interests and researchers under their influence try to have it both ways – publication of results in a prestigious journal while withholding the raw data and code books on which independent sources necessarily must rely in order to replicate the published results. The essence of empirical science is replicability. Thus, the JRSM has an opportunity to correct the critical defect which nullifies much of what gets published and is accepted by government regulatory agencies as bona fide empirical science.
Notwithstanding the usual arguments and practices based on First Amendment free ‘commercial speech’ and ‘trade secret and intellectual property laws’ in the US and elsewhere, the end result is the production of a body of published and unpublished research that cannot be replicated. Indeed, one must rely on depositions in lawsuits against commercial interests to learn the details of premeditated bias in published and unpublished reports. Is the JRSM up to the challenge?