A competing interest, also known as a conflict of interest, can occur when you (or your employer or sponsor) have a financial, commercial, legal, professional or personal relationship with other organizations, or with the people working with them, that could influence your research.
Full disclosure of any conflict is required when you submit your paper to a journal. The journal editor will firstly use this information to inform his or her editorial decisions. They may then publish such disclosures to assist readers in evaluating the article. Or, instead, the editor may decide not to publish your article on the basis of any declared competing interest. You can declare the competing interest in your cover letter. If no conflict of interest is disclosed, this is then perceived as a statement of absence of conflict.
Competing interests can be financial or non-financial in nature. To ensure transparency, any associations which can be perceived by others as a competing interest must also be declared.
Examples of financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):
- Employment or voluntary involvement
- Collaborations with advocacy groups relating to the content of the article
- Grants from an entity paid to the author or organization
- Personal fees received by the author/s as honoraria, royalties, consulting fees, lecture fees, testimonies, etc
- Patents held or pending by the authors, their institutions or funding organizations, or licensed to an entity whether earning royalties or not
- Royalties being received by the authors or their institutions
- Stock or share ownership
- Benefits related to the development of products as an outcome of the work
Examples of non-financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):
- Access to data repositories, archival resources, museum collections, etc by an entity that might benefit or be at a disadvantage financially or reputationally from the published findings.
- Writing assistance or administrative support from a person or organization that might benefit or be at a disadvantage from the published findings.
- Personal, political, religious, ideological, academic and intellectual competing interests which are perceived to be relevant to the published content.
- Involvement in legal action related to the work.