The conversation

I occasionally write articles for ‘the conversation’ which is an online news and opinion journal populated by the unrefereed and vaguely cited madness of academia.

The journal is very particular about the conflicts of interests of their authors, and disclosures of same.

But the contributions are gratis and published under creative commons.Therefore there is no legal requirement for disclosures of conflicts of interest; it’s really just driven by the self interest of the journal and the related avoidance of emotional conflict from their outraged academic readers.

As an aside they could add a universal disclaimer for their academic authors as follows;

“The author has in the past been known to consider themselves a world expert in xxxxx and any writing by the author has a primary purpose of expanding that feeling to all subject matter in the known universe”