The Ethics of Ghost Authorship in Biomedical Research:
Concerns and Remedies
Centre for Ethics, Joint Centre for Bioethics & CILP Workshop
Wednesday May 4th, 2011 from 8:30 am to 5:15 pm
FLA (Classroom A), Flavelle House, 78 Queen’s Park Avenue,
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Recent controversies have raised concerns about the integrity of
authorship in scientific publications, particularly when pharmaceutical
corporations pay undisclosed ghostwriters to prepare journal articles to
which academic experts lend their names.
Ghostwriting and its implications will be the focus of an intensive
one-day workshop, which will bring together medical researchers, legal
scholars, medical journal editors, academic administrators, clinicians,
medical writers, bioethics experts, patient advocates, and a US
congressional investigator. The workshop aims at exploring the various
implications for academia, medical research, clinical practice, and the
legal system and to discuss remedies to curb or control the practice.
Speakers and commentators include Mario Biagioli, An-Wen Chan, Jocalyn
Clark, Raymond Devries, Carl Elliott, Bijan Esfandiari, Lorraine Ferris,
Adriane Fugh-Berman, David Healy, David Korn, Linda Logdberg, Trudo
Lemmens, Alastair Matheson, David McKnight, Harriet Rosenberg, Sergio
Sismondo, Simon Stern, Paul Thacker and Ross Upshur.
The event is sponsored by: the Centre for Ethics; the Centre for
Innovation, Law and Policy; the Joint Centre for Bioethics; and the
Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, as well as by a research
grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on the
Ethics of Biomedical Research.
Participation is free but registration is required. The audience is
limited to 50 people and registrations will be taken until the limit is
achieved. People will only be admitted if registered. A limited number
of places is available for students.
For registration contact Tara Park at tara.park@utoronto.ca, with your name, professional affiliation, address, phone number, and e-mail address.
Registration deadline: April 22nd
