In Reply. —Dr Relman is incorrect in claiming that the NEJM does not reveal anything about financial conflicts of interest to reviewers. Most conflicts of interest are inferred from the institutional affiliation or the funding source of the authors. While some journals mask this information from referees, the NEJM includes it with manuscripts sent for review. More to the point, the decision to publish is not made by reviewers, but by editors. The NEJM policy requires that authors present all information about potential conflicts of interest (including any information that might not be apparent from institutional affiliation and funding source) when submitting a manuscript. Since this information could be solicited after manuscripts are accepted for publication, one can only suppose that the editors require it before the review so that they can take it into account in making their decision about publication. If the NEJM editors wanted to judge submissions.
