Robots and conflicts of interest

From “Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? This Robotic Assistant May Find It First”  recently published in the NY Times:

What should science do about conflicts of interest? When they are identified, they become an obstacle to objectivity... Sometimes a conflict of interest is clear cut. … But other cases are more subtle, and such conflicts can slip through the cracks, especially because the papers in many journals are edited by small teams and peer-reviewed by volunteer scientists who perform the task as a service to their discipline.

The Times  piece further notes: With such problems in mind, one publisher of open-access journals is providing an assistant to help its editors spot such problems before papers are released. But it’s not a human. Software named the Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant, or AIRA, checks for potential conflicts of interest by flagging whether the authors of a manuscript, the editors dealing with it or the peer reviewers refereeing it have been co-authors on papers in the past…(Note: prior coauthoring of an article by itself would not constitute a COI, but could be an indication of one.)  The tool cannot detect all forms of conflict of interest, such as undisclosed funding sources or affiliations. But it aims to add a guard rail against situations where authors, editors and peer reviewers fail to self-police their prior interactions.

Note that the use of data mining for COIs is not new. Indeed, for many years, auditors have looked for matches between the addresses of employees and vendors. And  anti-corruption compliance programs increasingly involve data mining, as is true of competition law compliance too

Moreover, the specifics of efforts like these will vary by industry. (E.g., the co-author relationships of the type referenced above would presumably  be relevant only to businesses where publishing plays an important role.)

But for any company it is worth considering – based upon the company’s risk profile – whether there  are any opportunities of this sort.