About the Journal

The Compound Journal is a monthly publication of record for a market that did not previously have one. It covers three overlapping subjects: the pharmacology and clinical evidence for GLP-1 receptor agonists and the molecules following them; the legal and commercial machinery of pharmaceutical compounding; and the research-peptide supply chain — the synthesis houses, packagers, freight routes, certificates and testing laboratories through which most of this material actually moves.

It was founded in January 2024 by Inés Abernathy, who had spent eleven years covering pharmaceutical manufacturing and generic-drug supply for two trade weeklies. The founding premise was that the incretin story was being reported almost entirely as a clinical and cultural story when the contested part of it — potency, provenance, sterility, price, availability — happens in manufacturing and logistics, and that a publication reading documents rather than press releases would find a great deal that nobody was reporting.

What we do

We publish twelve features, forty-eight department pieces and roughly a hundred and ten newsroom dispatches per issue, across fourteen standing departments. Every piece carries a byline, a dateline, a department, an issue number and a word count. Where an argument rests on published work, it carries a references block with journal and year.

We buy material. The vendor dossier programme purchases research-grade peptide at retail prices, as an ordinary customer, and submits it to independent laboratories at the Journal’s own expense. We publish the purchase date, the price paid, the laboratory, the method and the result — including the results that disagree with each other, which we do not average away.

We write to companies. Every quarter, the supply-chain desk puts specific written questions to each of the twenty companies in the dossier programme, and records the question, the date and the outcome. A dossier is a record of a correspondence, and the unanswered questions are printed as prominently as the answered ones.

We correct ourselves in public. Every correction the Journal has published is collected in a running log, dated and linked to the piece it amends. We do not silently edit a published article: the original text stays, the correction is printed with it, and both are recorded.

What we do not do

• We do not sell anything. No products, no commissions, no affiliate links, no paid placements in editorial, no sponsored articles, and no paid vendor verification of any kind.
• We do not give medical advice. We report; we do not recommend doses, products, sources or schedules, and we do not tell a reader what to do.
• We link vendor storefronts, and label them. Each dossier carries a link to the company’s own shop, near the top and again at the end, marked nofollow and sponsored, so a reader can set the Journal’s account against the seller’s. We are paid nothing for those links, they carry no advertising relationship, and a link is not a recommendation. Advertising on these pages is separately labelled.
• We do not publish anonymous claims about named companies. A reader report is printed only when a purchase can be substantiated and a date established.
• We do not sell scores. The Journal score on a dossier is not for sale, is not negotiable, and is revised only at a quarterly review against the record.

Who writes it

Thirty-two named contributors: an editor-in-chief, a standards editor, a two-person fact-checking desk, staff writers, and contributing correspondents in eleven cities. Their beats, credentials and full archives are on the contributors page. Nobody who writes for the Journal accepts speaking fees, consultancy, honoraria, travel or equity from a pharmaceutical manufacturer, a compounding pharmacy, a testing laboratory or a research-chemical vendor. Where a contributor has a prior relationship with an organisation we cover, it is stated on their contributor page and in the piece.

How it is paid for

Advertising, and nothing else. Four organisations advertise in the Journal and all four are named on the funding and disclosure page. Sponsors see no editorial copy before publication, have no input into what is covered, and two of them have been criticised in these pages during periods in which they were paying us. There is no paywall, no subscription, no membership tier and no reader data business — we hold no accounts and set no tracking cookies.

Corrections and contact

Correspondence, including letters intended for publication: letters@compoundjournal.com. Factual challenges, corrections and complaints about our conduct: standards@compoundjournal.com, which reaches the standards editor directly. We reply to every substantiated factual challenge, and we publish the outcome whether or not it favours us.