PLoS Tobacco Ban
02.24.10 by Michelle Kienholz
PLoS Medicine has joined PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE in not accepting “papers where support, in whole or in part, for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company.”
Long-time readers of the blog will know that I say, Bravo! I particularly appreciate their rationale:
First, tobacco is indisputably bad for health. … Tobacco interests in research cannot have a health aim—if they did, tobacco companies would be better off shutting down business—and therefore health research sponsored by tobacco companies is essentially advertising.
Second, we remain concerned about the industry’s long-standing attempts to distort the science of and deflect attention away from the harmful effects of smoking. … we do not wish to provide a forum for companies’ attempts to manipulate the science on tobacco’s harms.
They acknowledge this policy will have minimal impact on submissions as PLoS Medicine has not received any manuscripts involving tobacco support and PLoS ONE only two. However, they note that
the business model used to support our open access publishing (the research funder covers publication costs, unless the author requests a waiver) means we would essentially be accepting money from the tobacco industry by publishing their papers. This is unacceptable to the editorial team of PLoS Medicine.
Again, I applaud PLoS for another commendable contribution to the scientific community.
