[pompino]

The actual journal that this was submitted to is Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 27. The linked article is a pre-print. Hardly surprising that the pre-print website did not contact every author of every article for their affiliation.

[tokai]

The affiliation not provided to SSRN looks ominous, but is just a standard form because she does not have ssrn profile. The other co-authors do have a profile. University academics are usually much better networked in Elseviers registers as both their institutions and themselves rely on it for carreer/evaluation purposes.

It depends on how the affiliation is stated in the next volume of VjET, if this is problematic or not.

[pvg]

The obligation to disclose potential conflicts (which is what this is, rather than merely 'affiliation') is on the researcher not the publisher or transmitter.

[pompino]

The website talks only about affiliation.

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything. As such, its not worth arguing about. So your personal view of what is a potential conflict isn't something we can get into here. But what would be interesting is if you actually had evidence of bias in the article. That is definitely something we can discuss - regardless of who said it.

[pvg]

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything.

There are common practices for that sort of thing and 'works for a competitor' falls well within them. The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias. There really isn't anything complicated to discuss here.

[pompino]

>The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias.

You are the reader here. Do you have any evidence of bias?

[pvg]

I'm saying the omission of the disclosure of an obvious conflict is a bad lapse. It's bad whether it results in bias or not and independent of what I think. The OG commenter was right to point it out and you're not right to suggest it only counts if there is evidence of bias.

[pompino]

For any journal, compliance is not the goal, the goal is the have high quality, impactful papers. If you care about compliance more than the paper, then sure, so be it, but its not a conversation I'm particularly interested in.