The Sunshine Act and Transfers of Value: Impact on Non-industry Authorship.

The United States Physician Payments Sunshine Act requires pharmaceutical and device manufacturers that participate in United States federal healthcare programs to report certain payments and items of value given to physicians and teaching hospitals. One of these "transfers of value" is the cost of expediting the preparation and publication of industry-sponsored journal articles with the use of outside editorial assistance. This can be problematic for those United Statesbased physician-authors whose home institutions have implemented policies to distance their faculty from pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. Potential strategies include using in-house editorial assistance when available, but transfers of value remain subject to further interpretation, and company policies are not uniform industrywide.