Abstract
There are fairly good guidelines and rules of thumb to assess costs incurred to animals when one evaluates a manuscript for publication. The information at hand allows the reviewers more or less to figure out what kind of procedures the animals went through. A certain degree of severity of the experiment can roughly be evaluated, i.e. the costs to animals can be ‘measured’.
How about the potential benefits to humans when performing animal studies? What are the guidelines that reviewers can apply to assess the second arm of the ethical evaluation of a submitted manuscript? The answer should be found in the guidelines given to authors. However, instructions to authors’ guide of scientific journals scarcely mention any information on this question. Moreover, the question is not really considered in Laboratory Animals guidelines for authors. There are objective reasons for this. With the huge scientific information increasing exponentially, it is more and more difficult to have up-to-date and objectively reviewed topics of research allowing editorial boards to evaluate the potential benefits. Moreover, with papers coming from all around the world where prospective human benefits can vary from one country to the other, depending on their socioeconomical, environmental, sanitary and health situations, the real benefits to humans, animals and the environment is more and more difficult to grasp. However, this second arm of the ethical evaluation is THE key for justifying animal experimentation.
Should this be a topic of concern to editorial boards? Editorial boards are assuming that this evaluation has been carried out at the level of the researchers’ institution or at governmental level in the authors’ country. Therefore, there is no need to duplicate such a process. However, we think that there is a risk that papers which do not really reach the high ethical standards Laboratory Animals is promoting can be accepted. The risk can be especially high when a project comprising several mechanistic, functional and technical parts has been ethically reviewed globally but is published in small parts disseminated in several journals.
We would like to take an example from the paper ‘Synergies or validation of a new automatic smoking machine to study the effects of cigarette smoke in newborn lambs’ by Duvareille et al. published in Laboratory Animals 2010;
SIDS is without doubt a very serious event that clearly justifies further research. However, as described by the authors, good evidence can already be found in the referenced literature that tobacco smoke is considered to be the single most important cause of preventable death by SIDS. With the information provided by the authors, what are the benefits for human health that this technical paper contributes to by using the ovine model? As discussed above, this paper integrated in a larger project may stand a positive ethical outcome but singled out it may no longer make sense, at least for reviewers and editorial boards.
To assess benefits for human health when experimenting with animals is not a simple task and we do not have a ready-made solution to propose. A line of thought would be to ask authors the cost-benefit assessment made during the ethical review process and the relevance of the animal model.
Through this letter we aim at opening the discussion and as Laboratory Animals is a scientific journal publishing papers at the forefront of laboratory animal science and of research in the 3Rs, we ask the editors to take the lead in this discussion by including rules in their ethical guidelines assuring that enough information is provided by the authors to assess the prospective benefits to society of studies involving animals.