Great work as usual. Here’s a minor comment before I dig more substantively:
In the past I have had very demanding standards around Conflicts of Interest, including being critical of others for their lax treatment of the issue. Historically this was not an issue because I had very few conflicts. However this year I have accumulated a large number of such conflicts, and worse, conflicts that cannot all be individually publically disclosed due to another ethical constraint.
As such the reader should assume I could be conflicted on any and all reviewed organisations. [Emphasis mine]
I think the issue with the last line is that if everything is seen as a conflict of interest, then nothing is. I obviously don’t know the details of your ethical constraints, but I think readers who care about COIs might still benefit from lower-granularity announcement tags of the following form:
I have mild conflicts of interest with this organization.
I have moderate or strong conflicts of interest with this organization.
If orgs are only split into 3 categories (no, mild, and moderate/strong), this may preserve your desired privacy/other ethical constraints while still leaking enough bits that donors who care a lot about COIs can productively use that information.
You are correct that this would be much more useful—indeed this is essentially what I wrote into an earlier draft. Unfortunately the specific nature of the other ethical constraint makes it difficult to share even the existence of the conflict with any specific group/individual.
Great work as usual. Here’s a minor comment before I dig more substantively:
I think the issue with the last line is that if everything is seen as a conflict of interest, then nothing is. I obviously don’t know the details of your ethical constraints, but I think readers who care about COIs might still benefit from lower-granularity announcement tags of the following form:
If orgs are only split into 3 categories (no, mild, and moderate/strong), this may preserve your desired privacy/other ethical constraints while still leaking enough bits that donors who care a lot about COIs can productively use that information.
You are correct that this would be much more useful—indeed this is essentially what I wrote into an earlier draft. Unfortunately the specific nature of the other ethical constraint makes it difficult to share even the existence of the conflict with any specific group/individual.