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Ontario’s privacy watchdog has ordered the province to publish the names of the 100 doctors whose billings to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan are highest. An adjudicator, ruling on an access-to-information request from the Toronto Star, said the billings are “not personal information” and, even if they were, it would be in the public interest to reveal them. The Ontario Medical Association, which represents the province’s 28,000 physicians, opposed release of the data, saying it could be misconstrued. (Billings are not salaries but gross payments from which doctors must pay office overhead, benefits and pension.). The OMA has not yet …

In science as in politics, most people agree that transparency is essential. Top journals now require authors to disclose their funding sources so that readers can judge the possibility of bias, and the British Medical Journal recently required authors to disclose their data as well so that experts can run independent analyses of the results. But as transparency becomes the standard, many academics are resisting the trend without pushback from their universities. After researcher Wei-Hock Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was caught taking money from fossil fuel companies while claiming that climate change is not happening, the Smithsonian …

About Transparency International Slovakia The main goal of this portal is to objectively and clearly inform the public about the relations between doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Aiming to increase transparency, the Slovak Ministry of Health introduced the idea of publishing information about relations between doctors and pharmaceutical companies in 2011. However, the information is diluted into the websites of three different institutions, which disempowers the patient in search of it. Our portal brings forward a unified source of information about the relations between and pharmaceutical companies. The database allows one to look for information by name or the doctor’s workplace, …

C’est une première dans l’histoire parlementaire. Le bureau du Sénat a décidé, à l’unanimité, jeudi 28 avril, de demander au président du Sénat, Gérard Larcher, de saisir le parquet « sur les suites à donner aux déclarations litigieuses tenues sous serment » par le professeur Michel Aubier, chef du service de pneumologie à l’hôpital Bichat. Le pneumologue est accusé d’avoir menti sous serment devant les sénateurs sur ses liens d’intérêts avec le groupe Total, lors de son audition, le 16 avril 2015, devant la commission d’enquête « sur le coût économique et financier de la pollution de l’air ». Ainsi …

Transparency is a buzz word these days. We expect to see it in declarations by our politicians, company financial results, in science, and in decisions made on medicines and treatments by health-care bodies, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine Executive Director Denis Horgan. The latter are usually based on clinical trial results regarding safety and efficacy, as well as, inevitably, cost. The European Medicines Agency, or EMA, is quoted as saying just over a year ago: “We…have set new standards for clinical trial data transparency by adopting two landmark policies.” These were a 2010 policy on access to document and a …