Elsevier Under Fire for Fake Scientific Journals
This story was reported in the British press a couple weeks ago, but in my mind hasn’t gotten quite enough play. What you have here is a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company producing six publications it passed off to the scientific and medical community as independent, peer-reviewed medical journals, when in fact, they were nothing more than advertorials for drugs produced by Merck. From the Guardian UK story:
The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous. Any industry with global revenues of $600bn can afford to buy quite a lot of adverts, and pharmaceutical companies also buy glossy expensive “reprints” of the trials it feels flattered by. As we noted in this column two months ago, there is evidence that all this money distorts editorial decisions.
This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.
In a statement to The Scientist magazine, Elsevier at first said the company “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘journal’”. I would like to expand on this statement: It was a collection of academic journal articles, published by the academic journal publisher Elsevier, in an academic journal-shaped package. Perhaps if it wasn’t an academic journal they could have made this clearer in the title which, I should have mentioned, was named: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.
Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. “This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place,” he said.
As Open Access publications have taken the research world by storm, organizations such as the American Association of Publishers have openly assailed such provisions as the NIH policy mandating public access to NIH funded research under the guise that research free from copyright would somehow be dangerous to the scientific community. If I were running the AAP today, I’d be finding a way to ride the Open Access wave, especially if I had to choose between the despicable practice Elsevier engaged in vis-a-vis revolutionary providers such as PLOS and others that are trying to expand access to credible scientific research.
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