Sir

Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) welcomes with enthusiasm your new policy of asking authors to declare their financial interests (Opinion, Nature 412, 751; 2001). We congratulate Nature for taking a bold position on an issue of great importance.

SGR is particularly concerned that financial support from certain sources can skew the aims of research and distort the objectivity that is fundamental to good science. We have recently published a booklet entitled An Ethical Career in Science and Technology? (see http://www.sgr.org.uk/ethics.html). We hope that authors everywhere will support this policy and that scientists, their employers and those publishing their work will share the responsibility for ensuring an ethical approach to conducting and reporting scientific research.

One potential risk with a policy of voluntary disclosure is that a large proportion of authors may opt not to disclose. Yet mandatory disclosure risks penalising scientists who are contractually required to withhold information about their interests. Nature's approach may well be the best in the absence of a clear solution to this issue, but in the long term all science funding should be open to public scrutiny.