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Some 1500 documents revealed in litigation provide unprecedented insights into how pharmaceutical companies promote drugs, including the use of vendors to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

Dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of menopausal hormone therapy (HT), and to cast raloxifene and other competing therapies in a negative light.

the pharmaceutical company Wyeth used ghostwritten articles to mitigate the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with HT, to defend the unsupported cardiovascular “benefits” of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia, Parkinson's disease, vision problems, and wrinkles.

ost disclosure statements are not designed to be read; they are designed to be clicked on. But some companies actually want their customers to read and understand the statements. They don’t want customers who might sue, and, just in case, they want to be able to prove that the customers did understand the risks. So the leaders in disclosure statements right now tend to be financial and health-care companies – and also space-travel and extreme-sports vendors. They sincerely want to let their customers know what they are getting into, because a regretful customer is a vengeful one. That means making disclosure statements readable. I would suggest turning them into a quiz. The user would not simply click a single button, but would have to select the right button for each question. For example: What are my chances of dying in space? A) 5% B) 30% C) 1-4% (the correct answer, based on experience so far; current spacecraft are believed to be safer.) Now imagine: Who can see my data? A) I can. B) XYZ Corporation. C) XYZ Corporation’s marketing partners. (Click here to see the list.) D) XYZ Corporation’s affiliates and anyone it chooses. As the customer picks answers, she gets a good idea of what is going on. In fact, if you're a marketer, why not dispense with a single right answer and let the consumer specify what she wants to have happen with her data (and corresponding privileges/access rights if necessary)? That’s much more useful than vague policy statements. Suddenly, the disclosure statement becomes a consumer application that adds value to the vendor-consumer relationship.

And show the data themselves rather than a description.

this is all very easy if you are the site with which the user communicates directly; it is more difficult if you are in the background, a third party collecting information surreptitiously. But that practice should be stopped, anyway.

Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures

The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”

pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real medical journal but was in reality nothing more than advertising for Merck

As reported by The Scientist: Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship. "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies," Peter Lurie, deputy director of the public health research group at the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said, after reviewing two issues of the publication obtained by The Scientist. "But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle." The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one). The Scientist obtained two issues of the journal: Volume 2, Issues 1 and 2, both dated 2003. The issues contained little in the way of advertisements apart from ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx.

there are numerous "throwaway" journals out there. "Throwaway" journals tend to be defined as journals that are provided free of charge, have a lot of advertising (a high "advertising-to-text" ratio, as it is often described), and contain no original investigations. Other relevant characteristics include: Supported virtually entirely by advertising revenue. Ads tend to be placed within article pages interrupting the articles, rather than between articles, as is the case with most medical journals that accept ads Virtually the entire content is reviews of existing content of variable (and often dubious) quality. Parasitic. Throwaways often summarize peer-reviewed research from real journals. Questionable (at best) peer review. Throwaways tend to cater to an uninvolved and uncritical readership. No original work.

Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman’s remarks in the Wall Street Journal Asia piece, “Leaked cable spooks some U.S. sources” dated 3 Dec 2010. The paragraph in question went like this: “Others laid blame not on working U.S. diplomats, but on Wikileaks. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “deep concerns about the damaging action of Wikileaks.” It added, ‘it is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence.’” (emphasis my own)

on 25 Jan 2003, the then Singapore Minister of Foreign Affairs and current Senior Minister without portfolio, Professor S Jayakumar, in an unprecedented move, unilaterally released all diplomatic and official correspondence relating to confidential discussions on water negotiations between Singapore and Malaysia from the year 2000. In a parliamentary speech that would have had Julian Assange smiling from ear to ear, Jayakumar said, “We therefore have no choice but to set the record straight by releasing these documents for people to judge for themselves the truth of the matter.” The parliamentary reason for the unprecedented release of information was the misrepresentations made by Malaysia over the price of water, amongst others.

The then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir’s response to Singapore’s pre-Wikileak wikileak was equally quote-worthy, “I don’t feel nice. You write a letter to your girlfriend. And your girlfriend circulates it to all her boyfriends. I don’t think I’ll get involved with that girl.”

American Airlines has been caught in a row over customer engagement after it fired a contract worker for responding to a complaint about their website.

Mr Curtis, an American web designer, was unimpressed by his experience using the the AA.com website, and made that clear in a lengthy open letter to the company on his blog, complete with a suggested redesign of the homepage (see the gallery above), saying he would be “ashamed” of the site. He also suggested that they fire their design team.

Mr X, a web designer, responded to the letter, saying in a long email that Mr Curtis was "so very right" about the problems of the website, but that it was less to do with staff incompetence and more to do with the internal culture of the airline. Mr X also told Mr Curtis that they were improving the website, but that it was a slow process. By speaking to Mr Curtis, however, Mr X was in breach of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) he had signed with AA, barring him from revealing sensitive information.

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."

being both a working scientist and a science writer gives me a unique perspective on science, scientific publications, and the significance of scientific work. The final disclosure should be that I have never published in any of the top rank physics journals or in Science, Nature, or PNAS. I don't believe I have an axe to grind about that, but I am also sure that you can ascribe some of my opinions to PNAS envy.

If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.

Because science requires funding, and no one gets a lifetime dollop-o-cash to explore their favorite corner of the universe. So, the question gets broken down to "how competent is the scientist?" "Is the question they want to answer interesting?" "Do they have the resources to do what they say they will?" We will ignore the last question and focus on the first two.

But some lines do have to be drawn if good government is to be possible, just as a zone of privacy in our personal and family lives is crucial to sustaining the relationships that matter most to us.

Some of WikiLeaks’ releases of sensitive material have been perfectly defensible on classic freedom-of-information grounds, exposing abuses that might otherwise have remained concealed. The helicopter gunship killings in Iraq, the corruption of former Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s family, and the paucity of progress in Afghanistan are, by this standard, fair game. None of this makes Julian Assange a Daniel Ellsberg (who 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US-government thinking on Vietnam). Nor does it put him in the same league with Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist who was murdered after refusing to stop investigating Russian human rights abuses. His stated motives seem too anarchic for that. Sometimes, however, whistles do need to be blown.

But some leaks are indefensible, and at least the sources must expect some punitive reckoning. This category includes leaks that put intelligence sources or other individuals at physical risk (as did some of WikiLeaks’ early releases on Afghanistan and Zimbabwe). It also includes leaks that genuinely prejudice intelligence methods and military operational effectiveness; expose exploratory positions in peace negotiations (invariably helping only spoilers); or disclose bottom lines in trade talks. What is clear in all of these cases is that the stakes are so high that it simply cannot be left to the judgment of WikiLeaks and media outlets to make the necessary calls without consulting relevant officials. Sensibly, US officials facilitated such consultations, on a “without prejudice” basis, in some of the early WikiLeaks cases.