David Magnus Defends the New Managerial Solution for AJOB as Udo Schuklenk Resigns from the Editorial Board

At last, there is word directly from the bench of the accused in the recent controversy regarding the new managerial solution for the American Journal of Bioethics after the Glenn McGee resigned as editor in chief to join a rather dodgy private stem cell company [since Slate retracted the article linked to here, apparently following threats of lawsuits from McGee, this link is now broken. Thanks to Nature, the background on the murky business of CellTex is still around, however] as full-time adviser/lobbyist/expert. My former posts on this matter are here: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Today, I learned that another heavy resignation from the board of editors following these events has occurred: Udo Schuklenk has announced that he steps down from this position, preferring to keep his exact reasons confidential with reference to being being part of the editorial management of a competing journal, Bioethics.

David Magnus, one of the two newly appointed editors in chief – the other being Summer Johnson McGee, whose appointment I have criticised – addresses the rather rich variety of critical reactions to the new AJOB order, as well as its background, in a post at AJOB's adjunct blog. Given the amount of criticism that I have been mounting, I think it is only fair to cross post what David writes in its entirety (my comments can be found below, after the post):

David Magnus Corrects the Record Regarding AJOB

Over the past couple of weeks, a great deal of drama has played out regarding changes at the American Journal of Bioethics. While we appreciate all of the support we have received from our Editorial Board and much of the leadership in the field, a number of misleading or false claims have been made about which I feel obligated to respond.

1. It has been claimed that the Editorial offices of AJOB were relocated to Celltex. This is false. It is a matter of public record that the offices of the journal have been and continue to be based at 3030 Post Oak Blvd. #805 in Houston, Texas. These are not the offices of Celltex and Celltex housed no AJOB editorial office or AJOB activity on their premises.
2. It has been claimed that Glenn McGee took the job at Celltex and planned to continue to serve as both EIC of AJOB while working at Celltex until bloggers and twitter revelations forced a hasty change in plans.  In fact, when Glenn first decided that he was likely to move to the private sector, he decided it would be best to resign from AJOB. Transition plans began then—and this can be attested to by a number of leaders within the field of bioethics, since a number of them were aware of the transition plans.
3. Most of the attacks fail to acknowledge that Glenn had already been working to transition out of his role at AJOB as soon as he accepted his new position. During the transition he had no role in the oversight or acceptance of manuscripts for the journal. Failure to acknowledge that he was in the process of transitioning out of AJOB and that conflict of interest provisions had been put in place is a misleading rendition of events.
4. Charges of nepotism have been raised against the appointment of Summer Johnson McGee as the co-EIC of AJOB. This charge is false. It was my idea (not Glenn’s) for Summer to be proposed as co-EIC. It was up to Taylor and Francis (not Glenn and not me) to make the final decision to sign her to a long-term contract as co-EIC.  This is one of the more offensive charges, since it fails to acknowledge the reality that Summer is a scholar in her own right and that she is in fact the backbone of the journal. Anyone familiar with the workings of the journal knows that Summer has taken on more and more responsibility for the journal over the past several years—unfortunately while getting little recognition for her contributions.
5. There has also been a charge that Summer is too conflicted to serve as co-EIC or that her COI cannot be managed or mitigated. This issue has already been addressed, but to reiterate: conflicts of interest are ubiquitous among journal editors. What is unusual in this case is that one of the sources of spousal COI is actually known. In contrast, most of us know very little about what, if any, COI issues exist regarding spouses or other family members of most bioethics journals (for the record, my wife is a public librarian). As we have already stated, Summer will have to recuse herself from any possible COI, including those that may arise out of the fact that her husband works for a stem cell company.  I do not believe that this will be hard and knowing the range of manuscripts that we typically review, it will be a minority of submissions. I will personally review all manuscript submissions (as will Summer) and no editor will be involved in manuscripts for which they have a COI. Since we have two co-EIC’s and two new Associate Editors, we believe that it should be relatively easy to divide any labor. To improve our management of COI issues and to update our now 10 year old COI policy, we are shortly going to be looking for volunteers among the three Editorial Boards to create a standing COI committee and charge them with helping to create guidelines and processes for better managing COI’s. We have actually been successfully managing conflicts of interest among ourselves for a long time (for example, an article was recently accepted that was written by one of my faculty) and there is no reason to believe that recusing Summer from reviewing the manuscripts where a COI exists can not be accomplished.

Going forward, Summer and I have a lot of exciting plans for AJOB. We plan on creating several committees (not just a COI committee) to explore ways of improving and expanding the journal and bioethics publishing generally. We also look forward to instating a business meeting for our Editorial Board at ASBH each year, a working meeting where we will update our board members on the state of AJOB, solicit their opinions, and hear reports from the committees we have created. These are but two ideas among many that we plan to institute. We have two new Associate Editors who have agreed to join us (we will send an announcement about this shortly). And we are excited about the opportunity to lead AJOB—the most cited journal in the field.

 David Magnus, PhD

Now, of these sorts of criticism, I have wielded only one, the fifth and last one, although I did point out in my initial post that the handling of the publication of the transition, its procedural steps and its background has been far from as open, professional and clear-cut as one would have expected from the leading journal of a flourishing field of research. Apart from not appreciating the impact on trust of the many serious mistakes that has been made in this process (by the former and/or the new management, by Taylor & Francis, and so on), David, I think, addresses several of the points of criticism fairly well. However, I do think that his take on the fifth still leaves much to ask for. What he says in so many words is this:

1. Yes, through Summer Johnson McGee's marriage to Glenn McGee, AJOB does have a clear-cut conflict of (vested) interest built into its editorial management, but that may very well be the case with other journals too!  

This hardly needs comment, does it? Imagine a prosecutor arguing thus: I have clear evidence to prosecute person P for the crime C, but since there are possible other individuals that might have been possible to prosecute for other crimes, had I only had the evidence, prosecuting P for C is out of the question. Case closed.

2. AJOB will be beefing up its organisation for handling the actualisation of the COI of Summer Johnson McGee (and other COI's that may appear) in particular cases, so that it does not wholly depend on the subjective judgement of the person attached to the COI, or other people of the editorial management, alone, but another three people recruited from the editorial boards of all AJOB journals.

This seems like a necessary minimal step given 1, but is it sufficient? Well, in the end this comes down to trust, doesn't it? My position here is rather like the one voiced by John Lantos: In the face of a journal that prefers to house and attempt to "manage" a serious COI in the midst of its highest management when it is quite possible to avoid it in the first place, I do not feel a tingling buzz of increased confidence and trust, rather the other way around. I, as I suspect most of my colleagues do, ask myself the obvious question: why does David Magnus make this far from necessary choice that seriously threatens the credibility of the journal? Why, for instance, does he not start with a clean editorial slate and manage the practicalities of the transition by engaging both McGee and Johnson McGee in temporary advisory capacities to this effect – naturally, rewarded to the extent that their high qualifications and competence require? The point here is not that there may be answers to these questions and that the string of follow-up questions and subsequent answers may go on for a long time. The point is that, from the point of view of the best interest of the journal, there are obvious strategies to avoid having these questions being actualised in the first place. Not choosing these from  the start undermines trust, and trust is what David Magnus above asks of all of us who care for the integrity of AJOB and the field of bioethics research. It doesn't add up, simple as that.

Mike King on My Take on the Sexism Accusation re. Criticism of New AJOB Management.

Mike King of the Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago, New Zealand, has provided an interesting comment to my latest post on the issue of a severe conflicts of interest within the new management of the American Journal of Biotehics.

Mike points out that, apparently, some of the leaning on AJOB and the McGee's around the net may have been read as a slanderous rant about Summer Johnson McGee not being qualified for the job of editor in chief, but getting it only because of her marriage to Glenn McGee, the resigning editor in chief, or – alternatively – that Johnson McGee, as a woman, would be unable to think for herself in relation to her husband.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mike King that if this was all there was to the criticism against AJOB, this criticism would indeed be nothing more than a dirty piece of sexist garbage. However, arguments of the sort alluded to have certainly not been what I have been set forth as the basis of my criticism (see my former posts, starting with last one linked to above). Neither is it to be found in the critical messages of Howard Brody or John Lantos. And, frankly, I cannot see how anyone could read that into either of our critical contributions on this matter.

So, just to be crystal. crystal clear: my claim is based on the fact that the link of marriage between the old and the new editor in chief preserves the vested conflicts of interest created by the former signing on as full time consultant for a dodgy, private stem cell therapy company. This since marriage by default makes the financial interests of spouse intertwined.

That's all there is to it.

The Conflict of Interest Claim Towards New AJOB Editorial Arrangement is not Sexist

The controversy surrounding the new editorial arrangement for the American Journal of Bioethics after Glenn McGee decided to step down in order to work full time as consultant for stem cell company CellTex (covered in former posts here, here and here) continues, now in the landscape of big science, in this news article in Nature.

In the article, new editor in chief, Summer Johnson McGee defends the decision of publisher Taylor & Francis to appoint her editor in chief against the criticism that this cements rather than resolves the conflict of interest created by Glenn McGee's move to industry:

Responding to questions from Nature, Summer Johnson McGee says that the journal has a conflict-of-interest policy that requires editors to withdraw from reviewing a manuscript if they perceive a conflict. She calls allegations that her appointment results from her relationship with her husband “baseless and sexist”.

Now, the firtst line of defense here has already been addressed by the critics, in particular by John Lantos, who resigned from the AJOB editorial board over this matter. And I happen to agree with John about how much of a wife-of-Ceasar-principle has to be applied in the case of defending the credibility of bioethics journals. Simply put: one of the well-known logics of conflicts of interests is that they tend to make you bad at spotting where the conflict is actualised in particular cases. Thus, the report c-o-i based on subjective perception principle is not by itself good enough. A broader margin of safety against suspicion is required to uphold the credibility of a leading ethics journal.

More interesting is Johnson McGee's second line of defense. The claim of "baselessness" is, of course a complete misnomer and question-begger. It is a fact that she and Glenn McGee are married and that, in virtue of that arrangement, vested interests of Glenn McGee are by default also such interests of Summer Johnson McGee. Therefore, I have argued, the conflict of interest is not resolved but rather sustained by switching from one to the other in the leading editorial management role of AJOB.

Now, this way of arguing is, Johnson McGee seems to hold, sexist. Well, Summer, allow me to retort that it is in fact this very line of defense of yours that is a case of sexism. The argument based on default economic relations between spouse holds regardless of the sex or gender of the people involved in this relationship. That is, my argument would have stuck just as much had the roles between you and Glenn been reversed (you being the one leaving the e-i-c position for industry, and Glenn taking up your managerial torch). What you seem to claim is that you should be let off the hook because you happen to be a woman. That, if anything, is a sexist line of argument.

If this is all there to say in defense of the new AJOB editorial arrangements, I would say that the state of things in the management of this journal appear to be even worse than what they appeared to be before. For I cannot convince myself that even Johnson McGee herself seriously believes in what she tries to sell through Nature. This, I would say is not the voice of conviction, but of desperation.