Pharma associations and conflict of interest in article written by KS Jayaraman in Nature

In ethical journalism, one of the preconditions before publishing comments of people is to actually verify facts and make logical and informed decisions. KS Jayaraman, in his recent article on the Indian Open Source Drug Discovery Initiative did not probably check on the credentials and associations and of course conflicts in interest of the John Quackenbush modulated by his association with pharmaceutical companies in the United States. Even after thoroughly reading through the article. It would have been necessary to disclose the obvious conflict of interest in the statements quoted to give readers the right set of information. A casual search on Google revealed few of many associations, publicly disclosed. It would be obvious to assume the pharma sentiments against an Open Source Drug Discovery approach , very similar to the initial take on Open Source Software by major software enterprises.

Students rubbish KS Jayaraman's anti Open-Source sentiments on Nature News

In a recent fiasco at Nature news, KS Jayaraman's article on the Indian Open Source movement for Drug discovery was rubbished by the participants and the community at large.

The article which vented out his personal vendetta against the OSDD Initiative and its Chief mentor Prof S.K Brahmachari , and the recent Connect to Decode initiative to re-annotate the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome has proved to be a fiasco by itself. The article stated the claims as "hype" and needed peer review, quoting researchers in the United States, whose credibility and experience on genome annotation was questionable. The views were publicly rubbished by the participants and community. The angry exchanges filled up the comments section of the News article, making it one of the most discussed article on Nature news in the immediate past.

The article , despite being published in a respected Nature News, managed by the Nature Publishing group, has already undergone two major corrections, diminishing the authenticity of the article altogether. The article prominently linked to a data resource which was published much before the annotation jamboree was announced, and also favorably ignored the participation of the Systems Biology Institute's participation in the entire annotation Jamboree.

Apart from that Dr Anil Kumar, who was quoted in the article has also stated that he was misquoted and his statements were used out of context, putting the last nail in the coffin. Now there have been requests by the community to Nature to actually put up the unabridged transcripts and recordings of the conversations, as the community at large feels Jayaraman has used his position at Nature to drive his agenda against OSDD and its Chief Mentor, rather than understanding facts. In fact a quick check on SysBorgTB, the Open portal for collaboration set up by the community, did not reveal Jayaraman as a user, also substantiating the fact that the statements made by Jayaraman or the other international experts quoted on the data or its quality has not been made after proper analysis.

In a supportive note to the community, Dr Gary Schoolnik of Stanford University in California, principal investigator of its TB Database TBDB, said that his team "is very supportive of the Indian strategy", including the use of students as manual curators to annotate the genomes. He says the Stanford database team will look for ways to complement the Indian undertaking "once it is more fully developed".