Calling public airing of alleged failures to disclose conflicts of interest “a serious ethical breach of confidentially,” the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association in an online editorial last week said it will require anyone who complains to the editors to remain silent while an investigation is underway. The editors also will require individuals alleging that authors of a journal article failed to disclose relevant conflicts to “provide a written detailed explanation of the unreported conflicts of interest and provide documentation to support the allegation.”

The new policy is the result of a public spat with Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuro-anatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., who last fall informed the JAMA editors that Iowa University psychiatrist Robert Robinson, the lead author of a study evaluating the use of Lexapro (escitalopram) for poststroke depression, had failed to disclose his serving on the speakers bureau of Forest Laboratories, which makes the drug. A subsequent investigation confirmed the charge, and a correction appeared earlier this month.

However, Leo also sent his original complaint to the New York Times and publicly aired the issue in the British Medical Journal, leading to several heated telephone exchanges between the editors and Leo. The Wall Street Journal Health Blog reported earlier this month that JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine D. DeAngelis told the newspaper that Leo was “a nobody and a nothing.” The editor also notified Leo’s dean that the professor was engaged in actions that “were potentially damaging to JAMA’s reputation,” according to last week’s editorial by DeAngelis and deputy editor Phil B. Fontanarosa.

The editors denied that they had impugned Leo’s reputation, even as they stuck by their decision to pressure the dean to curb Leo’s public statements and established new rules requiring silence while alleged failures to report conflicts of interest are under investigation. “As a faculty member (assistant dean of students) of a school preparing physicians who will care for patients, Leo certainly is ‘somebody doing something’ very important,” they wrote. “To characterize Leo any other way would be erroneous and disrespectful, and this was never done by the editor in chief of JAMA.”

This story first appeared in Integrity in Science Watch, an online publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.