BMJ  2006;332:489 (25 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7539.489-a

Letter

More on JAMA's policy on industry sponsored studies

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Fontanarosa and DeAngelis refer to "numerous errors and misconceptions" in our editorial,¹ but they mention only two, one of which was attributable to editing by the BMJ.^{2 3} The other was our presumption that under JAMA's new policy, authors from industry must hire an academic statistician before submitting a paper. Fontanarosa and DeAngelis claim that the JAMA policy actually allows submissions from industry without an academic statistician. JAMA, however, will simply refuse to accept them until the authors purchase an academic statistical review.

If a JAMA paper must have an academic statistical author to be acceptable, we assumed that investigators from the private sector would not submit a paper to JAMA without such an author. Why would JAMA review such submissions if they are unacceptable a priori? Does this stance imply that the academic review is cursory, and that the academic statistician would not join the . . . [Full text of this article]

RTI Health Solutions, RTI International, 200 Park Offices Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA

Medical Statistics Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1 7HT stephen.evans@lshtm.ac.uk

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