Legal remedies for medical ghostwriting: Imposing fraud liability on guest authors of ghostwritten articles

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Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at the conference on the Ethics of Ghost Authorship in Biomedical Research: Concerns and Remedies, organized by the authors with support from the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, The Centre for Ethics, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto on May 4, 2011. The authors thank the presenters and participants at the conference for their thoughtful comments. The authors also thank Dr. Hamid-Reza Raziee for assistance with references and background research. The research and conference were supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on The Promotion of Integrity in Biomedical Research (TL). The authors also thank students of TL's class on Pharmaceutical Governance for valuable discussions.

Author contributions

Wrote the first draft of the manuscript: SS TL. Contributed to the writing of the manuscript: SS TL. ICMJE criteria for authorship read and met: SS TL. Agree with the manuscript's results and conclusions: SS TL. Jointly developed the structure and arguments of the paper: SS TL. Wrote the first draft of sections 1 and 2, and had primary responsibility for the discussion of concerns associated with ghostwriting: TL. Wrote the first draft of section 3, and had primary responsibility for the discussion of fraud: SS. Made critical revisions and approved the final version: SS TL.

Funding: The research is supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on The Promotion of Integrity in Biomedical Research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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