There are widespread financial relationships between journal editors and healthcare industry in the United States (US) across specialties. These relationships could be conflicts of interest among editors: however, no studies have been assessed the extent of the relationships in infectious diseases.

Using the Open Payments Database between 2014 and 2022, financial relationships between the healthcare industry and all US-based physician editors of the six clinical infectious disease journals with the highest impact factors were evaluated. Proportion of the editors with payments and payment amounts to the editors were calculated.

Of the 82 eligible US physician editors, 61 (74.4%) and 45 (54.9%) received non-research payments from the healthcare industry for the periods 2014-2022 and 2020-2022, respectively. Meanwhile, 22.4% and 40.3% received direct research payments and associated research funding over the nine years. The total payment amounts to the editors were $3,996,131 in non-research payments, $933,813 in direct research payments, and $39,394,410 in associated research funding. The majority of US physician editors received non-research payments between 2020 and 2022 in the Clinical Microbiology and Infection, Clinical Infections Diseases, Journal of Travel Medicine, and Journal of Infectious Diseases. Only two journals had conflicts of interest policies for their journal editors available on the journal webpage. Additionally, none of the journals disclosed the editors’ conflicts of interest.

This study found that the majority of the US-based physician editors of high-impact infectious disease journals received payments from the healthcare industry. Additionally, these financial conflicts of interest among the editors were not publicly disclosed.