Managing institutional conflicts: Stakeholder accounts of communication between conflict of interest and technology transfer offices.

There have been repeated calls for academic institutions to develop policies and procedures to manage institutional conflicts of interest (ICOI) arising from technology transfer activities. While prior research has examined adoption of ICOI policies by medical schools and universities, little is known about how these institutions handle ICOI in practice, hindering the development of evidence-based recommendations to improve ICOI management. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 senior administrators responsible for research integrity and conflict of interest issues at academic institutions. Data were analyzed using a descriptive qualitative content analysis approach, combining flexible coding to index the interview data with close examination, interpretation, and synthesis of coded content. Participants identified communication and information sharing between conflict of interest (COI) and technology transfer (TT) offices as a critical factor in the effective management of ICOI and suggested several strategies to strengthen coordination between these offices. These findings suggest that academic research institutions could strengthen COI programs by taking measures to improve communication and information sharing between COI and TT offices.

Informations de copyright

Copyright: © 2024 McCoy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

To confirm, Dr. Joffe serves a paid member of a data safety and monitoring board for CSL Behring (he is not an employee of the company) and the role on the DSMB is outside the context of the current study. I do not believe it would be appropriate to include a funding statement confirming that CSL Behring played no role in the study, as they did not fund any aspect of the study. Based on journal guidelines (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now), I believe this information should instead go in a competing interests statement, which we have added to the manuscript. If this needs to be revised please let us know.