Next month, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services will nearly double the number of journals that oncologists can use to justify payment for off-label use of cancer meds and procedures. But at least one of the 11 cancer journals added by CMS - called Bone Marrow Transplantation - doesn’t require publishing an author’s conflict of interest disclosure statements (see page 3), and more than half don’t require registration of clinical trials prior to publication of results, according to a Center for Science in the Public Interest survey.

In comments submitted to CMS last year, the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, which represents the nation’s 20,000 cancer docs, balked at the requirements, even though it moved quietly in the wake of the protests to adopt both policies at its own journals, CSPI tells us.

“The best way to identify those journals is through the considered opinion of the physician specialists who treat patients with cancer,” wrote Joe Bailes, co-chair of the government relations panel for ASCO. “In the abstract, ASCO agrees that these two criteria are among the appropriate (indications) of quality in scientific or medical journals, but they are not the only significant criteria, and they should not be utilized to foreclose otherwise appropriate coverage.”

In two letters to CMS, the advocacy group points out, ASCO had recommended 14 journals be added to the approved list. Six of the ASCO-nominated journals were rejected, including the Journal of Thoracic Oncology and Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, neither of which have conflict-of-interest disclosure policies.

Hat tip to the Integrity In Science project