Scientific data are critical to our understanding of the harm reduction potential of novel tobacco and nicotine products. Such data can be used in shaping evidence-based regulation and to inform consumers of the relative risks of tobacco product use. Increasingly, there are calls to preclude data generated by manufacturers in informing policy, as this data is seen by some as not ‘independent’ and biased by commercial goals.
This panel session will explore:
- What does independent mean when it comes to tobacco harm reduction science?
- Why might manufacturers’ data not be acceptable?
- Are manufacturers’ data on nicotine products any different from pharmaceutical industry data on novel drugs?
- Does not being independent mean that we should not trust the data? Should we ignore it? Or just acknowledge it and move on without looking at it?
- What are the dangers of ignoring evidence seen as ‘dependent’ and what does that mean for THR? Are there unintended consequences?
- How do we move forward from here? How do we make sure both dependent and independent evidence is used to inform consumers and to help shape regulation?
GFN 2024 Workshop - hosted by Ian Fearon with panellists: Marewa Glover, Sarah Cooney, George Hardie and Colin Mendelsohn
Transcription:
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Ian Fearon: Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for coming to this session. I hope you'll find it interesting and informative and maybe in certain times a little bit provocative. And thank you to the organizers for putting on a great conference and for timetabling this session. I'm Ian Fearon. I'm going to be the chair for this session. What we're going to do, we're going to introduce the panelists to you, this broad array of experts that we've assembled. We're going to talk about why we were here and what is this all about, what is this whole independent science and tobacco harm reduction issue. Then we're going to have a Q&A session, hopefully some audience participation, some questions, feedback, inputs from yourselves, and then we will wrap it up. So in terms of the panelists, they've come from all parts of the globe, myself from the UK, Sarah, who's Canadian, living in the UK. Marwa, who's from New Zealand. George, who's Scottish. And Colin from Australia. So from all across the world. Lots of different backgrounds, different perspectives on tobacco harm reduction. In terms of myself, I'm a scientist. I've been working in tobacco harm reduction for 16 years. 10 of those years were spent with British American tobacco. I've done many, many studies, published lots of scientific data in the arena of tobacco harm reduction. I currently work as a consultant to tobacco companies, nicotine companies, e-cigarette companies, drug companies, and contract research organisations. I'm a scientific advisory board member with Qnovia, who are exploring the nicotine replacement therapy space with an electronic nicotine inhaler in the UK and the US. I'm also a director and board member with Advanced Inhalation Rituals. The one thing I do want to say is that I'm discussing my own views and not those of any company that I do paid work for. So now each panelist will introduce themselves to you. They'll give their brief disclosures. I do have a slight disclaimer to make. I had to truncate Marwa's disclosures to fit on the slide. There's much more text that she had to include, but I couldn't fit it all on. So please do bear that in mind. She's not trying to hide anything here. So we're going to start off, I think, with Sarah.
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Sarah Cooney: I'm Canadian with an Irish passport living in London. I trained as a scientist originally but wasn't great at the bench so I moved into publishing. That was how I came to work in the UK. And after 12 years in publishing and four times being made redundant or being laid off, I wanted to do something different. And much to my surprise, I found myself working in a tobacco company. working with scientists, helping them to get their research published in the journals that I had been working on previously. So I left BAT a couple of years ago. I am running a small consultancy on science engagement and communication. I occasionally act as a guest editor for special issues. I had one published last year that actually Ian had a couple of papers in. and I'm hoping to be a guest editor on another toxicology journal special issue later this year. I always do that kind of work on a voluntary basis. The consultancy I have has, similar to Ian, clients in tobacco companies, nicotine companies, and also the chemicals industry. My disclosure says I worked for lots of different publishers. So I worked for Current Biology, which got bought by Elsevier, which is like the Microsoft of publishing. Then I worked for the Society of Chemical Industry. I worked for Nature Publishing Group. I worked for Biomed Central, which got bought by Springer. So I've seen a lot of the different journals, and I've been inside different publishing houses. So that's the perspective I'm going to try and bring today.
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Ian Fearon: Thank you, Sarah. Marewa.
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Marewa Glover: Kia ora. Thank you for having me on this panel. So I'm currently the director of the Centre of Research Excellence, Indigenous Sovereignty and Smoking. So it's a centre founded with the help of a grant from Global Action, formerly Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. And there was quite a bit more about that. My opinions of my own and the opinions of the Centre do not represent the views of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World or Global Action for Change at all. My Centre, we have no commercial interest in any cessation programs or AIDS or nicotine or tobacco products. In the past, I have received honorarium payments, and also, you know, because I've worked in universities for many years as an academic, so travel grants from, like, the Heart Foundation or Cancer Society or the government health research funding agencies, so mainly, you know, numerous sort of charities, incorporated not-for-profit societies, conference organisers, And obviously my university salary was covered by the many research grants that I won in researcher-initiated application processes. That goes to the university, they paid me, and that was mainly all taxpayer dollars. And it's been said a number of times at the conference in different panels that that taxpayer money, you know, part of that money or all the tobacco taxes go into that. So just acknowledging that. And I also, you know, won contracts with the Ministry of Health of New Zealand, Health Research Council, And I have received many years ago, like 15 consultancy fees from Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline for work on an advisory panel on Varenicline and Zyban and Champix, we called them in New Zealand. And it also was contracted to deliver training across New Zealand in nicotine replacement therapies when the government decided to fund those, to subsidise those products. None of the funding that I have received, as far as I know, was from tobacco companies or nicotine companies. I have attended conferences. I'll drink the coffee and I'll have the food that's... Sometimes the lunches have been sponsored by nicotine companies or tobacco companies. You know, I've got to eat. I really don't think that the fact that I have a coffee with somebody or that's sponsored by a company has influenced... Actually, you know, you try and influence me. You just try. I'm, you know, very strong in my opinions and... And all my work has been my own idea and researcher initiated. Unless, yeah, I've done some government where they wanted a specific thing, but you still put forward, you still do the analysis and you put forward your results.
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Ian Fearon: Thank you, Marilyn. We certainly look forward to those strong views that you have. George, over on the end there.
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George Hardie: Is this working or not? Yeah, that's better. I am the executive director for Dr. Vince Clinical Research based in Kansas City. I'm definitely not an American, as it says on my pass. I'm definitely Scottish. I was previously head of clinical research at British American Tobacco, where I was lucky to succeed Ian, actually. But for about 23 years, I was also a preclinical toxicologist. And my last job in toxicology was... head of inhalation talks at Pfizer UK and then I transitioned into clinical from there so even though I only look 21 I've been in this industry about 37 years and I feel in it I'll tell you so for DVSCR yes we do do work for nicotine tobacco companies but I am not paid by them I am paid by DVCR and it's an absolute privilege to be on this panel with such an esteemed panel
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Ian Fearon: Thanks, George. And last, but by certainly no means least, Colin. Yeah, thank you.
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Colin Mendelsohn: Like George, I'm only actually 37, but I've been working in this field for 40 years as a clinician, an academic, and a researcher, not like a proper one like him. I came to this field of harm reduction from working with patients and seeing that vaping was actually working and... have followed the research and been advocating for vaping ever since, so about 10 years. Some years ago a group of us doctors started a tobacco harm reduction charity to raise awareness of harm reduction in Australia. We did receive some funding from the retail vape industry, which we declared, and we've been punished ever since for that. We took a donation from the profits of this conference one year and we were punished for that as well, although it was declared. I did go to a conference in Dubai. They paged my travel. I gave a talk at the conference. I never heard the end of that back in Australia. I took no honorarium and I've written a book on vaping. Is that all I had to say? That's what's on there, yeah.
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Ian Fearon: Thanks, everybody. So why are we here? What is this all about? And I think the idea for this session came, it was kind of late summer last year, and it's the time that the UK government started its consultation on vaping. And of course, you know, the government is now planning to ban disposables, flavor restrictions, and so on. And I was asked in an email to provide some evidence to somebody that flavored vaping products are actually better in helping people quit smoking than unflavored vaping products. So I sent them a whole list of papers, and they said, we can't use these. And I said, why can't you use them? They said, well, we want independent evidence. These are papers published by manufacturers. We want academics data because we can trust academics data. We can't trust this industry data. It's useless to us. And that was a kind of a mindset, an ideology that I'd often come across, and everybody on this panel actually has come across. These people's views are tainted by where the money's coming from, who's funded it. But I hadn't really, I could just kind of dealt with it, really ignored it, but this got me kind of thinking about it, and that's the basis for this panel. And I think that kind of ideology is counter-reductive to tobacco harm reduction. Oh. And so I'm just starting with this, the Institute of Medicine report. Tobacco harm reduction goes back way before the IOM report, but the reason I'm putting up the IOM clearing the smoke report is because it's, the title says assessing the science base for tobacco harm reduction. Harm reduction is scientific. We need science to assess whether products are harm reduced products or not. And I think that's important in the context of what we're going to talk about today. And just so everybody's on the same page, and this is just the IOM's view of what harm reduction is all about. And they say that a product is harm reducing if it reduces death and it reduces disease, even though the use of that product may involve the continued exposure to tobacco-related toxicants. including nicotine, of course. You know, harm reduction involves continued use of nicotine, but less exposure to the things that cause cancer, heart disease, lung disease, et cetera. But what I think was really interesting in this report is the contributions that they gratefully acknowledge. They're thoughtful contributions, including many representatives from Brown and Williamson, Laurel Ard, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds. big tobacco companies, so they were very receptive to the thoughtful views in shaping their views on tobacco harm reduction. And of course there were drug companies that nicotine replacement therapy manufacturers had also contributed to the IOM thinking. Now to the kind of the current day, and I think recently I've certainly noticed this, is a kind of an upsurge in people trying to prevent the tobacco industry or the nicotine e-cigarette industry from publishing its data in scientific journals and disseminating it. So this is an editorial in the British Medical Journal from just a few weeks ago. And they have a policy which says any tobacco company shall not publish in any of our journals. And they're kind of reiterating this. And they're also extending it. So they're now applying it to all companies that produce, distribute, market and sell tobacco and tobacco-related products. And by tobacco-related products, they mean nicotine products, electronic cigarettes. It also includes organisations owned by the tobacco industry, such as the PMI-owned Vectura, foundations organisations such as Global Action to End Smoking, the Smoke Free Foundation, the Institute of Economic Affairs. It also includes consultants that do consulting work for tobacco and e-cigarette manufacturers. The interesting exception is supermarkets. If you're a supermarket, you can publish scientific data on tobacco harm reduction. So start sponsoring Lidl and Waitrose and Walmart and they'll publish your data for you because they're allowed to. And this is kind of reiterated in, this is another paper that came out about a month ago now, six weeks ago, and this was from the Health Equity Network of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco. And what they want the society to do is prohibit individuals who get any financial support from the tobacco and nicotine industries, including industry consultants, and we've got to ban them from publishing in our journal or presenting at our conference or being members of our society. Now, just two days ago, and this was very timely, I think, for this panel session, there was a rebuttal to that suggestion of prohibition of industry consultants, e-cigarette manufacturers, et cetera, from SR&T activities. And this came from a number of people who historically have been very active against the bigger tobacco companies. Mike Cummings, who's litigated against tobacco companies in many, many, many lawsuits. And what they said, The Health Equity Network nicely reviews past grievances against the cigarette industry, but doesn't adequately address the complexity of today's increasingly diverse array of tobacco and nicotine products. The commentary didn't explicitly account for the scientific opportunity costs that might be lost by prohibiting manufacturers from publishing their data. They further go on to say that assigning all companies engaged in nicotine research to be part of the cigarette company hall of shame is neither warranted nor helpful. the marketplace is rapidly evolving and we can't be, the society cannot be blind to the paradox of erecting barriers to creating and sharing the science on potentially reduced risk nicotine products. So, you know, and I'm sure there's a lot of people in this room that think the industry should publish their data, but there certainly is an external view as well, as I say, by people who historically have tried to beat up the tobacco industry. So the arguments that they use are negative arguments that industry data is conflicted. It's all commercial. They just want to sell more stuff to more people, get them more addicted and so on. The tobacco industry has a dubious past, which I think is undeniable, but it's a very different industry now. It's not all about big tobacco as well. It's about vape shops and small manufacturers and innovation and tech startups. They claim racism on the behalf of the tobacco industry. They say that THR, tobacco harm reduction, is a Trojan horse that's just trying to addict more people because cigarette smoking is declining. They need to support the consumer base. It's a Trojan horse. And they say it's industry interference which contravenes with the framework convention on tobacco control. On the positive side, Some people believe that manufacturers' data is important to the debate on tobacco harm reduction. It's important to informing consumers about healthier options, alternatives to cigarette smoking. The industry, quite ironically, is often told it has to be more transparent and make all of its data available. And I mean, how can you do that if you can't publish in journals? It just doesn't make sense. Industry studies are conducted to stringent regulatory standards. We're going to talk about this a little bit. Nicotine is not tobacco. The industry is very different now than it was even 10 years ago. And science should be judged on its merits. And certainly I think that's the thing that we will discuss in a little bit more detail. And I just want to talk about this whole independent, is independent good and is non-independent, i.e. dependent bad? And I'd recommend anybody just to read this article in Science. It's very easy to read, very lighthearted, and it's called A Prescription for Controversy. And one of the things it picks up on is this paper and this abstract. And if you read these, basically what it tells you is that if you use an electronic cigarette, you're more likely to have a stroke. That's pretty scary stuff, right? But if you kind of peel back the layers of the onion with this paper and this abstract, the first thing to know is that the end number the number of people that they took data from is 266,000. The actual number of people that took the surveys that they analyzed data from is about 15,000. So there's a conflict there. There's something not quite right about this paper. I'm not saying they're making stuff up, but it's not quite right. The other thing of interest, and that science article picks up on this, is if you see the list of authors, and they each come from different institutions in the United States, Now, as it turns out, each of these individuals had paid something like $600 to be an author on this paper. Their ex-medical students are trying to get their first residency as a doctor, and they paid so that they can put these publications on their CVs. And the lead author apparently doesn't even work at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He once did a master's degree there 15 years ago. But he no longer works there. So there's something not quite right. What I'm trying to say is, you know, people badge tobacco industry data as bad. It's conflicted. We shouldn't trust it, et cetera. But there are also elements of the independent data as well, which just aren't quite right. And I think we need to keep this in our thinking. We'll discuss this in a little bit more detail. One final thing, who actually accepts industry data? Well, the US Food and Drug Administration do. Philip Morris got marketing approval for their ICOS product based on a whole bundle of industry data. Health Canada accept industry data. Every regulator in the European Union accepts industry data to allow the marketing of electronic cigarettes under the Tobacco Products Directive. The UK Medicines Regulator accepts industry data. The US Institute of Medicine, I showed an example of that. OHID in the UK, which used to be called Public Health England. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I could go on. There's a whole bunch of organisations out there that trust industry data, that look at it and they use it in their tobacco harm reduction argumentation and policy development. So why shouldn't we just accept industry data? So I'm going to stop there. So what we're going to do, we're going to have kind of a moderated Q&A. I'm going to sit down. We're going to kind of start discussing these areas that I talked about, about industry data, publishing, etc., And then we're going to throw it open to the audience and hopefully get some questions from yourselves. So if I can grab a mic. Yeah. So I'm going to start off with the whole idea of industry publishing data. And I think I'm going to point this question at yourself, Mara. One thing you didn't have on your disclosures is that Mara is managing editor of the tobacco section of the Harm Reduction Journal. And Mara, you must see this all the time. You get papers submitted to you from tobacco companies, from e-cigarette manufacturers. How do you deal with that? And how did you look at it? Your journal must maybe have discussions at some point in time. Should we continue to allow these manufacturers to submit data to us? What were those discussions like? How did you deal with that?
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Marewa Glover: So Nick Crofts is the chief editor and the Harm Reduction Journal has many different sections, you know, gambling and other drugs, et cetera. And then I think it was about five years, you know, the establishment of the tobacco section. So, yep, I've been the editor of that and I do that voluntarily when I'm asleep. in my free time. And it's been really interesting. We talked about it. Actually, it came through Springer, is the publishing house, and there was some agitation, agitating for Springer to, across the board, prohibit papers from the tobacco industry. And so Nick, you know, discussed with all of the section editors. I think some of the other section editors even thought that that was a good idea. And... You know, the principles of a harm reduction come first for the harm reduction journal. This is about not doing harm, and this is about consumers and starting where people are at, et cetera. It... It's also the principles of harm reduction, not prohibition. So censoring and prohibition is antithetical to the principles of harm reduction. So no, we were not, as far as Nick was concerned, it was contrary to the principles. for Harm Reduction Journal to implement any kind of censoring or prohibition of any sort, including free speech. So science is the defining point. When I was appointed, he received complaints. Because at that time, my centre had begun. I was publicly known to have founded it with a grant from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. And yep, he received complaints and people demanding that I was fired. One of the other editors said, if you don't fire her, I will resign. So bye-bye. She's gone. And Nick is very strong on this. It's science first. And it's about recognising what these tactics of censorship and prohibition of free speech and closing down science is anti-science and does harm. So we do not have a policy... which is based on, let's see who they're funded by. The main thing is, have people disclosed it? Most people do disclose, as far as I know. And sometimes when I'm editing, and it is an industry paper, I do put in my comments back that, you know, your industry authors, reviewers will say, well, we do, we get reviewers that say, this is funded by industry, reject. I do not agree with industry papers being published, but I do want to make some comments. And so they'll still comment on the paper, which is helpful. And yes, we do get lots of comments like that. There are a lot of people who will not even review. They will not review anything. They won't review my papers, all of the people on your list there. They will not review. And this I knew from my time in tobacco control. I would never review an industry paper. It's like a policy that we had in tobacco control. We will not do anything to help tobacco industry papers. And so there are a lot of people out there in tobacco control who will not even review. There are some that will, where science comes first, and they're interested to judge it on its merits. But some papers from the industry A reviewer might say, you know, we know what the perception is going to be, and so I'll encourage them to talk more about this. I encourage things like, especially with the PMTA process, to do that application process, and they have to back up their argument with science. There are a lot of papers... that are being written for that purpose. As a scientist, science is about building scientific knowledge. Some papers are not science. They were written for the PMTA process. And on that basis, I might reject. Does this add to science? Does it extend our knowledge in any way? a paper that has just been written, evaluation of a product or consumers, you know, use of a product for the PMTA is not strictly science in my view. What's the scientific question is, if it deals with that, then that's okay. So the PMTA, some of the PMTA ones are just, they have a lot of marketing speech So that's a floor of some of the industry papers, it's gone through the marketing department or something, and it'll just have the product name just everywhere, every second word is the product name, and I'll go back and I'll say, you don't need to say the product name, you can say it once in the methodology, we used this product, but otherwise it's an oral nicotine pouch. a six milligram oral nicotine pouch or whatever type of e-cigarette. So sometimes I'll say, you know, take all that marketing stuff out and make it more scientific, like academic scientists would write about a product. You don't have to say the name every second word. So some industry papers are weak like that, but I just give feedback. and try to encourage a more scientific presentation that is kind of what you read everywhere and is expected.
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Ian Fearon: That's great. Thank you, Maureen. I think there's certainly a good number of industry people in the room, and I think that's some great advice for them. And Sarah, you've seen this from the other side, as somebody who's been helping, trying to help scientists, it's often very difficult, publish their data in journals. So I think it'd be interesting to hear your take about some of the things you've heard, some of the things that you've struggled with in terms of getting papers published.
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Sarah Cooney: So I first wanted to follow on from what Marais was saying. I did an analysis about journals that didn't accept tobacco-funded work. And I was really shocked when Nick Croft said last year that Harm Reduction Journal, that someone from Springer had tried to persuade you to go down the censorship road. I was really shocked because my analysis showed that mainstream commercial publishers aren't likely to go down blanket censorship roads because, you know, they have a lot of corporate commercial clients themselves. The, typically the journals that have a censorship ban are owned by medical and public health charities, so the censorship ban is sort of aligned with what their membership is expecting and what they want. So, you know, you can't do much about arguing with the British Medical Journal or the American Thoracic Society. You just have to sort of accept that those kind of society titles are just never going to be an option. But there are, you know, 30,000 journals, and so it's a matter of trying to find journals. The actual number with an explicit ban is relatively small, although there has been a change in that MDPI, a medium-sized open access publisher with 460 journals, they've recently gone to a full-scale ban. censorship ban. That's the first time I've ever seen a mainstream commercial publisher do that. So that was quite a shock, but I have another point I'll make later as to why I think they've done that. But in terms of helping authors, you know, you kind of do the research on target journals. Sometimes it helps to kind of do pre-submission inquiries to try and soften up the editors. Not soften them up, But more and more the very first decision when you submit a paper is reject without review or send out to reviewers. And this is because journals are receiving, you know, 25% more submissions than last year and they can't increase acceptances by 25% so they can only reject more. So trying to build a relationship with editors and with journals and try to kind of almost socialize your science ahead of the actual submission, because then if you've had a yes to a pre-submission inquiry, you can say, Dr. So-and-so encouraged us to submit. So the administrator who handles your initial submission is like, oh, okay, well then I can't reject without review. I'll have to send it out to refs. So it can be difficult because there are In addition to censorship in some society titles, you also find that there is bias from individuals, and you just have to learn who those individuals are, and you just have to avoid them. There are 30,000 decent journals. A subset of those 8,000 journals would be sort of science, medical, STM, so scientific, technical, medical, that are indexed for an impact factor, and that's generally a good sign of quality. So it's hit and miss, and learn as you go.
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Ian Fearon: Thanks Sarah. I just want to change tack a little bit slightly. One of the interesting parallels I think here is that we trust drug industry data. Our physicians trust drug industry data. They prescribe us medicines because the drug industry has provided evidence that these things are beneficial. They help treat ailments. George, from your experience, because you've worked for Big Pharma, you've worked for Big Tobacco, and now you have a role which crosses both of those areas. What are the differences between what the drug industry does and what the tobacco industry does? If there are any, are there any differences? What are the standards that the tobacco industry uses? Are they the same standards? So if you could just tell us a little bit about that.
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George Hardie: A nice easy one then, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I have worked for both pharma and tobacco and, you know, for them as well. Going back many years, you know, we were all aware that the tobacco industry has made some catastrophic mistakes, you know, but so have pharma. So all I can say is that Certainly in my time, when I transitioned over from pharma to tobacco, I was actually quite surprised how well clinical studies were actually monitored, for example. There's far more monitoring goes on in a tobacco study than there is a pharma study, for example. And by monitoring, I mean not just study monitoring, I also mean by safety monitoring as well. So making sure that the subjects, the participants are well looked after. Data standards have improved. enormously. No question about that. And I know one of my old colleagues at BET, she's been working in Caress, a working group on CDISC, so, you know, had them do a set of SDTM and all that. So it's constantly evolving all the time. And a point I want to make is some of the CROs that Right. So some of the CROs that do work for the tobacco and nicotine industry also do the same studies pretty much for pharma. So integrity-wise, the CRO's reputation is on the line as well as the tobacco and nicotine companies and pharma. So for me, definitely standards have improved. There are differences. There absolutely are. If anything, the tobacco industry is probably scrutinized more, I would say, and maybe quite rightly so. But to answer your question, can data be trusted? Absolutely, yes. But everybody has an opinion. And, you know, if you're anti-tobacco, you're always going to say, It shouldn't be trusted. If you're pro-tobacco, you'll say, yeah, it should be trusted. And this is, you know, it's a democratic world we live in. However, the data is the data. And tobacco industry has been... sort of, you know, there's been issues where they've maybe cherry-picked some of the data. But so have pharma. You know, let's be honest. So have pharma. Nowadays, everything that's certainly... I can only speak for the tobacco company I used to work for, is transparency. Everything that we'd done clinically, we published. It was... or we tried to publish, as Sarah will tell you, we did have a few problems. But we were open and transparent, and that was the leadership's ethos. Get it out there, let them see it, whether it's good data or bad data on that product. The standards are unbelievable. The MHRA, the FDA, and other regulated bodies are all over us, whether you work for a tobacco company or you do work for a tobacco company. So yeah, for my opinion, and I've been involved in a lot of the data that's gone out, I think it can definitely be trusted. But again, it's all about opinions, Ian.
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Ian Fearon: Thanks, George, for that insight. Colin, I've seen you scribbling a few notes. I'm going to give you the opportunity to speak. One thing I'm hoping you might pick up on is something that Maria mentioned twice, and that was we should assess the science. And I know you have a very strong view on that, so it would be great if you could... And then anything else you've scribbled notes on?
00:36:54 --> 00:41:25
Colin Mendelsohn: I agree with everything he said. And I agree that, from my experience, that the tobacco company research is of a very high standard, surprisingly high standard. And, you know, we go through these weekly analyses with Crive Bates of the publications that come out each week, and it's very rare to find problems with the tobacco company studies. The research and the standards of research are very high. I mean, I think censorship is really wrong, and I think to advance the science, we need to give all science the opportunity to be assessed. I do disagree that if you're anti-tobacco, you're automatically anti their research, in that I'm as anti-tobacco as anyone. I hate what tobacco companies have done in the past. But I really do think there has been a transformation, and we still don't entirely trust a lot of what they do, but we scrutinise it, and it's proving to be of a high standard. And I think we have to acknowledge that, but always maintain our scepticism of all research. I don't think it's different for tobacco companies to pharma. There's a lot of evidence that pharma-sponsored trials in the past favour their products. We know that and there's been studies to show that. And I guess there's the risk that will still happen, and that's why we just need to scrutinise everything equally. I don't think we need to subject big tobacco to higher standards. I think all biomedical science should be subjected to high standards because it's all about life and health and really important outcomes. So it should all be subjected to high standards. The problem is that... Peer review often fails miserably, and there are studies that have found that peer review typically misses a huge amount of flaws in subject, in trials. And that's disturbing but understandable. And there have also been studies from what I've read that when we try and train reviewers, we don't seem to improve the standards of review. So it's a never-ending problem. And could I just say one other thing that I think Sarah mentioned about journals that belong to associations and health charities and so on. I've had a lot of experience with that, trying to get research published in Australia. The Australian Medical Association owns the Medical Journal of Australia. They publish a lot of anti-vaping stuff. It's very hard to get any pro-vaping stuff in. I tried to submit a letter regarding one of their articles and I had to make eight revisions of this letter just to get the letter published. The Public Health Association of Australia has a journal, the ANZ Journal of Public Health. I submitted a commentary after a piece that had been written and two reviewers assessed it, came up with all these ridiculous objections. I got 25 Australian experts to write a letter back to them saying, that's ridiculous, you can't... They were quoting things like Ivali, the Gateway, cigarettes don't really work to help people stop smoking. We wrote back and said, that's ridiculous, you've got to publish this. And they said, oh, okay, we will. So they did. And then certain anti-vaping experts dug up a spurious conflict of interest of mine that hadn't been declared, which was spurious. And they said, I'm sorry, we're retracting your article, because it didn't agree with their position on vaping. I had to engage a lawyer. The lawyer wrote to them. They reluctantly accepted, all right, we'll leave it in for the moment, but we're not sure. We may want to take it out later. They wouldn't admit that they were wrong. And it was based on money from this conference that Gerry contributed to our association, not that I'd received. And so they were going to retract the article because of that. And it's all about this censorship of opinions that differ from ours. It wasn't about the science. They just didn't want people to hear the alternative view. And, of course, that would have been devastating for my career to have an article retracted. So that's been my personal experience. It's not about the tobacco industry, but it's about this whole divisive debate. And I think we need to give everyone a chance so people can consider both sides of the argument.
00:41:27 --> 00:42:26
Ian Fearon: Thanks, Colin, for those views. One thing that I talked about earlier was the SRNT health equity network said we must not allow in any way, shape or form anybody associated, paid by an e-cigarette manufacturer, tobacco company to present at our conference, be a member of our society, publish in our journal. And as I mentioned just recently, two days ago, there was a counterargument to that. And the counterargument was, hang on a minute. You cannot ignore industry data because it's informing tobacco harm reduction as much as non-industry data is. So I guess my question to all the panelists is, What are the dangers of complete prohibition of publishing by tobacco and e-cigarette companies? And what might the impact be on tobacco harm reduction?
00:42:29 --> 00:46:29
Marewa Glover: So I was a member of the Society for Research on Nicotine for many years and an associate editor of the journal. It's been very disappointing to see what has happened. And coming from tobacco control, the strategy has been to embed people in the committees. So these societies are run by committees. And the motivations for getting people in there and loading the committee with people of the similar view is because they've run, you know, they're a society and they're run by committees, all you need to do is manage who is on there. So some colleagues from New Zealand got on there. You know, they have been loading them. journal is the same. So Simon Chapman used to be the editor and it got passed to Ruth Malone and, you know, so it's only going to be passed to someone of like mind. And so the journals are being, those journals are being used in this, as a strategy to control the narrative and And there are many, many strategies that Tobacco Control use. In the previous session, you know, I could see those. There are people in Tobacco Control who are more strategists than they are researchers. They're more... lobbyists and strategists and they employ, you know, recruit professors from universities whose expertise is communication and marketing. And I've learned so much from them in terms of dissemination. But is what they do research? I just wanted to pick up on one of your points about you know, there's cherry picking. Well, tobacco control research cherry pick as well, and much of what is being published isn't science. It's opinion. And I see, you know, industry papers or related papers, and I see papers from academics. I've always sort of thought, you know, us academics, we're like the poor cousin. We don't have the amount of funding. of the science researchers and I've also been involved though in academic randomised clinical trials that very, you know, very high quality in all of the, you know, the measures that you talked about in terms of participant safety. So there are, there's some very excellent academic scientists in tobacco control and there are some who are not doing science, they're doing strategy. And there's many, many personal motivations. One of the papers you put up there, you know, a young Indigenous man, you know, I'm sorry, I was there, I've been there for 30 years, you know, they need me out of the way. And there's a lot of that sort of game playing that goes on. It has nothing to do with... And this whole thing of accusing people of making up lies and defamatory statements of people being not independent and having this conflict and being funded by tobacco industry, which has happened to me as well, and I had to get lawyers as well. is it's the strategy to remove people and silence the opposite view. Of course, science, as you said, Colin, is you need both sides to really understand, to advance our knowledge. You need all sides, and it's for scientists to judge that.
00:46:31 --> 00:46:52
Ian Fearon: and i think that's an interesting point it's almost like because i mentioned the whole trojan horse concept of of the industry in tobacco harm reduction it's almost like what you're saying is that there are some people in the anti-thr tobacco control community that are using science as a trojan horse when really they're just putting out their opinions and views and anybody else with any uh any thoughts
00:46:55 --> 00:48:15
Colin Mendelsohn: Mara was talking, I was just thinking, you can tell from who's written an article and what journal it's published in, you know what the result is going to be before you even read it. And, you know, often I'll look at, oh, yes, this is written by so-and-so, I know exactly what's coming, I'm not even going to bother. Yeah. and that's not to do with the tobacco companies it's to do with everyone has bias um bias is much more not just about financial bias it's very much more it's it's about more more than that it's much more about you know personal reputation funding from funding organizations peer approval career advancement and what your tribe says, and people, so many authors just never move past that, and that's not real science. The other thought I had was, With tobacco companies, of course, what we're talking about is harm reduction products. We're not talking about them promoting their cigarettes. We're talking about advancing knowledge about products that will save lives. And as long as that science is done well, I don't care where it comes from. I don't care what products people use if it improves health. And I think we need to hear everything they've got to say as long as it's done properly and we analyse it as best we can.
00:48:19 --> 00:49:15
George Hardie: I'd just like to follow on and say, you know, how can we be open and transparent when we're basically not allowed to publish? That's just crazy. You know, it's all about education for me. We just need to be out there and try and educate people who maybe don't quite understand the science as much. You know, certainly I wrote a paper on abuse liability. Submitted to the journal. It was accepted. We had it peer-reviewed. And then it went quiet. And then I got a message from the hand editor saying that it's going to be re-reviewed. And I went, why? It's already went through three peer reviews. So they actually, in the end, rejected it. So the industry, for me, I'm not as expert as Sarah is, for example, but There's fundamental issues for me within that industry that's prohibiting us to get the data out there. For me, we have to get that data out there for THR.
00:49:17 --> 00:49:55
Ian Fearon: I agree. And one thing I also, you know, kind of wondering about with some of the recent developments in this kind of prohibition of publishing is that traditional tobacco industry ban on publishing has now been extended in some people's minds to e-cigarette manufacturers because they're equally conflicted. And does that pose an additional threat to tobacco harm reduction? If manufacturers are completely independent from the tobacco industry, are also disallowed to publish their data? Anybody got any views on that?
00:49:58 --> 00:51:01
Sarah Cooney: So I don't think it's going to happen that every publisher is going to ban tobacco. I really don't. But it would be a tragedy if it did. So then you would be relying solely on what the regulator says about these data packages. Because they are, if you look at the US process, MRTPs are publicly available. It's not easy to trawl through all that material. So if some kind of ban like that happened, you'd have to find a way of... kind of digesting and sharing the material in the MRTP packages. And that's where manuscripts in journals are useful because it can chunk it down into sort of neat packages, as long as it's not all marketing speak, as long as it's done in a scientific way. But I think that the regulator and the fact that it's a regulated industry, the longer that it's a regulated industry with a relationship, a developing relationship with different regulators, I think there's some hope from that perspective because the regulators will put this data through enormous scrutiny and peer review. So maybe there's some hope there.
00:51:03 --> 00:51:58
Colin Mendelsohn: And the other issue related to that is that the companies have to produce accurate data for the regulator. I mean, there are legal obligations, and so that gives them extra... It gives it extra credibility. But what this all brings up is the divide that we're all suffering from in this field of... the pro and anti-vaping and tobacco positions. So some of the journals just take an anti-tobacco harm reduction position, and their opposition is simply ideological. It's not about what is the science, is this good science? It's about, well, we don't agree with this, and we're taking an oppositional position. And that's not really allowing the science to speak for itself. And we struggle with that all day, but the journals do too, and the editors. And, of course, the journals have their own biases and the peer reviewers have their own biases, as do the authors. So it is a complex area.
00:52:01 --> 00:55:15
Sarah Cooney: I want to say one other thing. Sorry, did you want to go first? No, you go. OK. I want to say one other thing about... Science journals are actually facing several crises. First of all, there's a crisis with peer review. There aren't enough peer reviewers for any subject. So I would encourage anybody in the room to volunteer to be a peer reviewer for whatever journals you are reading in. But science journals are also facing other really surprising threats to, you know, scholarly publishers are a big guardian of the integrity of the, of the integrity of the scientific record. And they are facing threats from things like paper mills, fake papers, so those, what you showed earlier where there are some paper mills and sort of criminal bodies that are selling authorship to accepted papers so that these people can get their medical degrees in whatever country. But it's a huge threat. I was just at the World Conference for Research Integrity, and the scale of fraud that's going on is astonishing. So to give you an example, John Wiley and Sons purchased Hindawi, which was an open access publisher, kind of medium-sized, for $298 million in 2021. I was kind of surprised because it wasn't a brilliant publisher, but whatever. And then a couple of years later, there started to be some problems. First of all, Web of Science delisted. several journals from MDPI and also Hindawi. So they were tracked for impact factors, had impact factors. The impact factors were removed. These journals had grown too quickly. There was no way you could quadruple or grow five times in one year. There was something fishy going on. Anyway, going back to Hindawi and Wiley, less than two years after they bought it, they had to issue a $9 million profit warning, and they had to do a large-scale investigation. They retracted 11,500 manuscripts, and they shut down 19 of those journals, and there's talk of kind of shuttering that Hindawi brand. There was a young guy from Elsevier who was a machine learning specialist. He is carrying out a similar set of analyses in Elsevier journals. He's halfway through it. But he expects the same sort of scale of retraction to come. I mean, that's astonishing, 11,500 articles retracted in sort of one swoop. So the kind of question of research integrity is going to become increasingly important. All publishers now have research integrity groups. They will analyze for different sorts of fraud. I mean, and it is criminal gangs that are behind a lot of these sorts of activities. And I was just surprised at the scale of the fraud. So I sort of feel that the tobacco industry, which has very, very high levels of research integrity and how it carries out its research today, I think there's something in this to sort of be a part of making sure you're compliant with the Singapore principles on research integrity and more recently there's a set of Hong Kong principles on how you assess researchers. I think it's worth making sure to be familiar with all of this and make sure that you've got internal policies that are aligned with this kind of trend to monitor research integrity.
00:55:17 --> 00:59:52
Marewa Glover: Just sort of adding to a number of points there. So science and papers. One of the things that you should look for, I should look for as an editor, is this making an original contribution to the body of knowledge on this topic? Does it add to the science? This is what I was taught as an academic. If you want to get published, you've got to be adding. The strategy of public health academics is to flood... flood the science literature. It's a political, ideological strategy to flood the literature. And you will see many, many papers that just reiterate exactly the same opinion. It might be different authors. So what they're trying to do is affect I guess, systematic reviews, Cochrane reviews, where they're looking at the weight of the science. They're trying to manipulate that weighting. Oh, look, there's 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 studies all saying this. Therefore, and on the other side you have a couple of hundred, And that weighting of science is what they're trying to manipulate. I've seen a lot, even as an academic, of breaches of the principles that... What's the authorship one called, Sarah? The, you know... Yeah, the, you know, criteria for being listed as an author. I have seen a colleague added to a paper. She changed one word in it, and it was to boost her academic career. So she was being mentored in the university to get her up there, get her to become an associate professor and a professor. I have seen and when I received a lot of media attacks initiated by these people and I did official information act requests which you can do in New Zealand of any organisation. I have a mountain of sort of you know, material that was supplied to me under that, you know, what they had said about me. That's under the Privacy Act. You can demand what has this organisation on what have they said about me, anything they've said about me, anything to do with me. I have emails showing a recent hit piece from one of these young men. Again, they've just got to keep reiterating this discrediting of me and this defamation that I'm funded by a tobacco company. and I have never been funded by a tobacco company. And I had lawyers, and we had one sort of win on this. But there was an email from his PhD supervisor, basically saying, you could write this, and dot points of what to put in his paper. Now that supervisor was not listed as an author, And the paper was copying some academic, white academic authors who had written a hit piece on the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World and local grantees. And then they just talked to the New Zealanders and say, you could copy this paper, here it is. And then, you know, the supervisor says to the young indigenous man who's to replace me as the indigenous expert in New Zealand, Here's what you can write. And I have that proof. This is the sort of thing that is going on where people are being added to papers and they didn't do anything. And they did not meet that criteria at all. And it happens all the time. I've been invited to be on papers. I went and invited someone at university to be on a paper. And she's like, no, I haven't met the criteria. Oh, okay. That was a learning for me. So there's a lot of fraud there.
00:59:54 --> 01:00:28
Ian Fearon: I think that's all very good insight into rigor on one side, but not necessarily rigor and adhering to standards on another, which is really interesting. I'm conscious that everybody's been sitting here listening very attentively to what we've been discussing, but now I think I would love to open this up for anybody who's got questions for any of us on stage, questions about publishing, about independent versus non-independent science, whatever it might be. So anybody got any questions?
01:00:30 --> 01:04:07
Marewa Glover: I don't think we've talked about independence very much in terms of, say, the Article 5.3, which is being used. And, again, if I can give what happened to me as an example. So the Ministry of Health was lobbied by these ex-colleagues in tobacco control... to blacklist me. So the Ministry of Health, a government agency, wrote a letter to all of their health systems, health services funded by them, that they are not to read my work. They're not to listen to me. They're not, under Article 5.3, they have extended, they have manipulated and said this is what Article 5.3 means. Actually, and I got lawyers and we began a judicial review process, which is something you can do under law. You need to review this decision you've made and action you've taken. My lawyers wouldn't have taken it on if I didn't have a case that I could win. And we began that process, and of course the first thing they say is, get lost. And it would have been very expensive. But the Article 5.3, and you need to go back to the framework, the FCTC, and read the wording. It is about stopping tobacco company manipulation of political decision-making. of policy making. It never, it doesn't, it never intended to be used against independent researchers. And so what they have to do is attack our independence, that we're not independent, that we're funded by industry. And they say it, I mean, even to Colin. And you've not been funded by the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. And the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World was set up as a charity, you know, 301 in the States. They are not allowed to. They'd lose their charity status if they worked for their donors. And so that's one level. You know, my lawyers looked at it all, and I believe that they were independent... And then they have a contract with me. And they don't have any say over... They don't see my results. They didn't conceive of the study idea. They didn't have any say on my methodology. My work was independent. It was like... In fact, in some ways, I had more independence than I did when I was an academic. Because when you're an academic, you're an employee. All the work you do is owned by the company. And I've definitely had, you know... academic administrators come and say, you're going to launch that research where? No, no, we won't. We'll pull your funding. And, yeah, so I just wanted to say with independence, the Article 5.3 is being misused by SR&T, by academics. They're rewriting the meaning of it. This is what they do all the time. They manipulate meaning and the narrative. And I wanted to restate that my work was independent of the foundation. I got a grant just like I did from a health research council or anyone else. I did my work. I published it. They don't see it until it's published.
01:04:08 --> 01:05:33
Colin Mendelsohn: Thanks, Mary. Colin, do you have a view? Yes, but I'd just make a comment about the mission creep for the FCTC. So in Australia, there's concern about the environmental impact effect of disposable vapes. So a small group of us got together and developed a project for a national recycling program, which we thought could be funded by manufacturers under government stewardship. And we'd spoken to recycling companies and various experts. So it was Alex Wolak and me and a manufacturer and a number of other people, no one from the tobacco industry. Anyway, we approached the Department of Health and said, or Department of Environment, said we have a program to solve this recycling issue, this environmental damage issue. And we said, it's Alex and me, and we have a manufacturer who will be involved in funding. Oh, we can't speak to you because, well, according to the FCTC, we don't speak to anybody to do with nicotine. What? Yes, I know. And we went back to them with expert advice about what actually is the FCTC along the lines of what you said and how it's irrelevant to vaping companies. And eventually they said, well, look, that's our policy. You know, you need to speak to the Department of Health. We can't speak to you about... ..even about a recycling program for vaporisers because that was a breach of the FCTC. So, unfortunately, they used that as a way of engaging and that was very distressing. We just gave up on that. We could see a long battle ahead.
01:05:34 --> 01:05:51
Ian Fearon: It is interesting how the lines have been... redrawn over recent years. So I think there were a couple of questions. Do we have microphones? There's a question down at the front. And then Mohammadi. If you could just introduce yourself. Yeah, that's great.
01:05:56 --> 01:05:57
Marewa Glover: Start talking. They'll turn it on.
01:05:58 --> 01:06:27
Rebecca Taylor: Sorry. Rebecca Taylor from the UK. So just based a bit on my experience in women's health, which is completely different, there is a problem with the research that is not funded. So in women's health, tons of research on fertility. very little on endometriosis because the money's not there. So I wanted to ask the panel, what do you think in terms of maybe the important research that is not getting funded?
01:06:33 --> 01:08:13
Marewa Glover: I've had trouble getting my research funded and have to submit several times, which has not been my experience throughout my career. It basically means that that narrative that is being put out there, that is anti-vaping, that is not based in science. They're trying to create the science. They're manufacturing science. A lot of it also is like advocacy research. The purpose is not science. It is about influencing politicians and peers and the public and the media. So if all sides, if all of the opinions, if all the science is not there, the policy analysts can't use it in making their decisions, so they're going to potentially overlook unintended consequences, either any positive or negative consequences of things in that policy analysis process. And they're likely to, they could make the wrong decisions. And as we all know, this is happening and people are going to die a lot earlier than they had to, you know, dying from a smoking-related illness is preventable. It's one of the public health problems and challenges that is completely preventable, and it's being prevented. You know, we're being prevented from preventing it.
01:08:15 --> 01:08:29
Ian Fearon: And can I just kind of ask again, sorry, to the lady that asked the question, is the challenge that you're facing getting funding to do independent academic research that supports harm reduction, or what is the challenge that you're facing?
01:08:30 --> 01:08:42
Rebecca Taylor: I'm not personally facing this challenge. I just wanted to ask the question, do they think there is research that is not getting funded because of this situation? I'm actually doing a job at the moment that's completely unrelated.
01:08:43 --> 01:08:47
Ian Fearon: I understand. Thank you. Mohamadi, I think, and then the gentleman at the front.
01:08:49 --> 01:10:25
Mohamadi Sarkar: Hi. Mohamadi Sarkar from Altria, tobacco industry scientist. So, Couple of questions, but before I pose a question, I just want to make a comment that I'm struck that I still get requests to review articles from journals that have banned industry research. And I find this is mind blowing. And I oftentimes think about rejecting that and just saying, do you really want me to review? Because you don't think that I'm capable enough to do good research to be published in a journal. That's besides the point. I would like the panel's point of view on two things. One, the role that AI can play in getting unbiased, quick reviews, because I mean, I agree with you. I take my job as a reviewer very seriously, and it takes an enormous amount of time to thoroughly review and check and cross-check some of the references, et cetera. So whether AI in the future may play a role, And the second question is, you know, any point of view on open access journals that are not listed in PubMed? And, you know, I've gone back and forth because, you know, the value of having a PubMed-cited publication allows broader awareness. But, you know, open access in like or F1000 may be suitable enough, but I don't know how many people would care to read for unless they actually specifically look for that topic.
01:10:26 --> 01:11:11
Ian Fearon: I'm going to provide a quick response, and then I think Sarah will have a view. I think the whole PubMed listed thing does give you visibility. For example, the Public Health England OHID reports, NASEM reports, those kind of authoritative reviews of the health impacts of vaping, it does give you that visibility. that visibility of the work, which might otherwise get lost. Other reviews, such as Cochrane, I found, you know, they kind of ignore that and they dig a bit deeper into other journal indexing systems. But it is, you know, I write papers for manufacturers all the time and it is something where I constantly try and push, get it in a PubMed listed journal because you have that visibility. But maybe, Sarah, you have a view on non-PubMed journals.
01:11:11 --> 01:12:32
Sarah Cooney: Well, I mean, a lot of journals are, newer journals are trying, you know, they're in the process of getting PubMed listed. My guidance would always, I wasn't really thinking about it from that perspective, but if a journal is owned by a reasonable publisher, so I'll always go back and see, well, who's behind this? Who, you know, what sort of organization's behind this? So Taylor and Francis acquired F1000. So in time, they've got, you know, they're quite strong. They should be able to get it listed in PubMed. So it may come in time. But I think that when you're asked to referee for journals that don't consider tobacco-funded research, I think that's a great opportunity to open up a dialogue. And maybe it's an administrator that's asked you that question. But I would push back and try and get a more senior editorial person and sort of say, you know, I've got limited time to referee. I'm not... I want to open up a dialogue. I do a lot of refereeing for your journal. I want to open up a debate about whether or not this journal should change its policy. How much are you relying on tobacco industry scientists like me and expertise like mine? It creates an opportunity to have a conversation. I think it would be really worth doing that, especially if it's happening a lot. You have? That doesn't make a difference? Oh, that's a shame.
01:12:33 --> 01:15:01
Marewa Glover: I put in the box, you know, like, well, you won't publish my work, and I'm very busy. So no, I'm not going to review. I wanted to speak to your point about AI. And Springer just did an internal sort of survey of editors. What did we think about, you know, the future of using AI? And I wrote quite a long response, I get it's so frustrating. It's a lot of work. Especially poorly written articles. They might have a really good point to make, but it's just really poorly written. And I'm like... please use AI. You know, even I want authors to use AI, except many journals now have a policy about AI, and you have to declare if you've used AI in any way. However, using a Grammarly or a PaperPal package just to help with grammar and picking up sort of spelling errors, that's not included in that. If you're using AI to do your analysis, yeah, then you must declare what you've done. So I wrote that, yes, please, why don't you use AI and run programs through it before you send it to editors, and then we're left to do work that AI packages can do like that. And I can't do it that fast. I've even been tempted to run them through AI myself and can do some of the reviewing for me. So I really think that it would help the publishing industry, the scientific publishing industry a lot. There's a number of programs they use which you'd know more about where they're looking for plagiarism and they're looking for... You know, they do these checks. But, I mean, I think that authors should be encouraged to use a paper pal as one of the AI packages, and there are many. Even ChatGPT can, you know... And there's so many AI packages now. You can say, write my abstract, and in two seconds, three seconds, it's given you a draft abstract. And then you can edit it and put it in your own voice. But that's frowned upon, isn't it, Sarah?
01:15:02 --> 01:15:37
Sarah Cooney: Well, I think the publishing industry is grappling with AI, and so various bodies like the European Medical Writers Association, the European Association of Science Editors, STM, which is the big sort of industry body for all the big publishers, they're all grappling with this to try and come up with a set of standards to make sure that things are fair and well-disclosed. So I think it's still very early in... for publishers to have come up with what those new set of rules are in this changing world. But it's a key thing they're working with.
01:15:38 --> 01:15:52
Ian Fearon: Just to add to that, Mohamed, I have seen an instance recently of AI being listed as an author on a paper. And I do wonder whether that meets the ICMJAE guidelines. But it is being increasingly used. We have a question, the gentleman at the front here.
01:15:59 --> 01:16:50
Chase Wallace: Thank you, I'm Chase Wallace from THR.net. I was very disheartened to hear kind of the political and ideological, those things permeating journals to such a high extent. And Mirewa, how you mentioned how the actual standards of being listed as an author are also sliding back in a lot of ways. So I'm just wondering, particularly because this affects, you know, nicotine research as well as research as a whole. I mean, this kind of undermines a lot of the foundations that make that, you know, make it so that it can be trusted at all. How do medical professionals and policymakers combat that in research journals? Because oftentimes those are where everyone's getting their data. So who can, you know, regulate that? Who can change that?
01:16:51 --> 01:18:20
Marewa Glover: I think that journal editors need to watch out for it. I mean, I have asked authors that have submitted a paper and, you know, they have 100 authors or whatever. You know, they have a lot of authors. And sometimes I'll say, were that many authors needed? And why are there so many authors involved? And it's the paper, you know, you go, you wouldn't have needed that many authors to do it. And I think some industry papers do that as well, but academics do it as well. Um... Yeah, so I think editors can do it. I think that people should complain to universities about papers that are being written by their academics. And it's not just complain to the journal. You know, probably that doesn't go very far. You know, it's a big system. But people... are being attacked and are the recipients of very unprofessional behaviour by academics. They are in breach of their university handbook. There are rules about academic professional behaviour and they are absolutely in breach of that. And I'm just like, why don't you complain? Complain to their employers about their behaviour. Yeah.
01:18:22 --> 01:19:14
Colin Mendelsohn: Yeah, can I just make a comment? Look, it's a dilemma for the average reader. I'm not highly trained in research writing and reading and analysis. And a lot of the papers, I'll read through them and think that sounds reasonable. And then Clive Bates or Ariella Selyer will go through them and say, yeah, look at what they've said here. And that doesn't follow that. And so for the average person, I think it's a real dilemma because of this ideological divide. People have an agenda. They have their biases. They're not always clear, and they're not always declared. And I think it's very hard to separate the good from the bad. And there's a lot of bad science driven by ideology, unfortunately, particularly in this field, as in probably most areas, but particularly in this very emotional and polarised debate.
01:19:17 --> 01:20:49
Sarah Cooney: I think also... I think also... You know, editors have to do more, but when publishers have been doing these investigations, they've discovered that editors are being bribed in some of their journals. So science publishing is facing a number of pretty significant threats, and as an industry, they will get through it. There's an initiative called Action Against Paper Mills, which is able to sort of... lay out kind of methodologies for catching these sorts of organizations, but we're in this kind of very tricky period and you know there are huge threats to science publishers at the moment. It's partly because you've gone from, it's an unintended consequence of open access and open science, where publishers have gone from being very very quality driven, to being quantity driven where when you have an open access journal you get a fee for every paper that you publish and if you have bad actors so predatory journals or predatory publishers they're just in it for the money so Biomed Central which was one of the early open access publishers they put so much effort into quality control so so so much effort into quality control and some of these newer actors don't and so when But now that we're moving to sort of being judged on successes based on quantity of manuscripts, publishers are now having to figure out how to kind of pull back from that and make sure that the quality aspects are taken care of. But it's a big problem.
01:20:50 --> 01:20:51
Mohamadi Sarkar: Can I just?
01:20:52 --> 01:21:38
Marewa Glover: Yeah, I just wanted to add not only, you know, there are paper mills. This has happened within university when they introduced this performance-based rating system of academics. And, you know, they rate you. You get rated on how many papers you're producing. what what standard of journal you've been or is it in an international journal or a local journal and so the whole commercialization of academia has led to them being paper mills academics have this pressure to publish and they might not even have an idea so so they're as much paper mills now as
01:21:40 --> 01:21:50
Ian Fearon: I think as an academic in a past life, I certainly relate to that whole research assessment exercise issue and how it contributes maybe to some of these issues. Norbert, I know you've been waiting very patiently.
01:21:51 --> 01:22:35
Norbert Zillatron Schmidt: Yes, I have a question about the use of AI. If you want to use AI anywhere, especially to promote science independently, How do you ensure that the training of the AI is independent, as we can see from the recent failure of the Google AI, when they produced absurdities that are totally off the rails?
01:22:35 --> 01:23:44
Marewa Glover: Yep, very, very good question. Given that we're talking about independence and when you start using AI, how does that impact your independence? I would only suggest using AI as a tool. It can do some things very, very fast. like looking for, you know, spelling mistakes, grammar, how can I shorten a sentence? Many of these packages suggest you could say it this way, so turning it into passive, from passive to active wording. It can help you shorten paragraphs. Many people are grappling with the limitation on words of publication, you know, how long your paper can be. And AI can go through and suggest how you can shorten it. It's not changing your voice. That's the difference. But if you start using what AI has said, you start saying, you know, write an introduction for me on such and such. No, then you're not writing it anymore yet.
01:23:47 --> 01:24:58
Ian Fearon: Thank you. I'm conscious that we're five minutes to lunchtime for everybody. So I think we're going to start wrapping up. And I think what I'll ask each person to do is just give a very quick view of what we've learned, what we've discussed today. And I think my own takeaway. is one that there are consumers here that we don't often think about. And those are the people who need to try and grapple with the science, whether it's independent academic or whether it's tobacco funded. But they're increasingly being faced with the slightly more powerful independent academic view, which is potentially anti-tobacco harm reduction. And the second thing I think is it's complex, it's not easy. There is an element of mistrust of industry data and I think it seems to me that that's being, the lines as I mentioned earlier are being redrawn and these rules are being applied to consultants in the space, to e-cigarette manufacturers are completely independent of big tobacco and maybe that can't be beneficial to consumers and to tobacco harm reduction moving forward.
01:25:02 --> 01:27:31
Marewa Glover: As I guess a wrapping up, I think that there is a real need for more papers that use a discourse analysis approach. We need more critique of papers that are written. Science is supposed to be about that. You put it out and other scientists will critique it. So if you have the skill of discourse analysis, this is where people who submit to Tobacco Section Harm Reduction Journal would have experienced this. Words are very important, each word that is used. And I'm looking at the words that people use. So one of the principles of harm reduction is person-centred language. And I am very picky, as some people know, about... I want this in person-centred language, and people might say, oh, but this is done everywhere else. I'm like, this is Harm Reduction Journal, this is a principle, and I don't care what's done everywhere else. So each word and phrase, and then if you understand rhetoric, which is used... It came up in your session, people talking... We're up against the use of rhetorical devices. These are ways to phrase things, to manipulate what the reader attends to, what's the image that comes up in their mind when they're reading this. The choice of words, I look very closely at that and I get that taken out and I say this is harm reduction journal, put it in person-centred language. I will reject papers if authors won't do it. The anti-vaping, anti-harm reduction literature is full of rhetoric. Vague, I also pick up on that, vague terms. If you have a vague term, and politicians do this all the time, it leaves it for you, the audience, to input your meaning. Oh, I think they meant this. It's a manipulative tactic, and I don't think that scientific authors should be using any rhetoric or any manipulation in their writing to manipulate the reader's digestion of the science.
01:27:34 --> 01:27:48
Sarah Cooney: Very, very briefly, I have hope that regulated, an industry that is regulated highly produces very, very high quality research with a high degree of research integrity. So I hope that will stand us in good stead in the long run.
01:27:50 --> 01:28:29
Colin Mendelsohn: Thank you. My takeaway is I think all research should be given the opportunity to be assessed for publication, no matter who's written it. I think we should all be sceptical of all research because biases and conflicts of interest are everywhere. They're not just financial. They're for all sorts of career and peer and ideological reasons. And I think we should apply the same standard of... peer review to all publications, no matter who's written them. So I think they should all be assessed to a high standard. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go with improving peer review.
01:28:32 --> 01:28:58
George Hardie: Yeah, totally agree. What I'd like to see going forward is a lot of the papers that are out there, obviously they're for scientists. I'd like to see a paper that comes out that the consumer can actually read and understand it. That's what I would like to see going forward because your ordinary person walking down the street doesn't understand what a C-max, T-max area under the curve is. I just want papers to come out and just give us a layman's term sort of example of that as well. That's what I'd like to see going forward.
01:29:00 --> 01:29:17
Ian Fearon: Well, thank you, everybody. Thank you to my panel. Really appreciate their time. Really appreciate your attending, listening, your questions. Hope you all have an enjoyable stay in Warsaw, the rest of the conference. And, of course, we'll all be around if you want to have some further discussions on what we've talked about. So thank you.