The U.S. government has dropped a plan to require universities to publicly disclose online what drug companies pay their faculty members, according to a report yesterday in Nature.
NIH's press office did not confirm the report on the status of the National Institutes of Health (NIH's) long-delayed revised conflicts-of-interest rules and would say only that "the current rule is under consideration by the Office of Management and Budget." But if the report is correct, the change would address complaints from academic organizations that the requirement to post the data on a Web site was too costly and would confuse the public.
Last summer the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Association of American Universities suggested that NIH instead set up a central database for disclosing conflicts. The groups said this would complement a federal database slated to go online in 2013 in which drug companies will be required to report payments to physicians.
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