Senate Exploring Med School Profs Putting Names On Ghostwritten Journal Articles In Favor Of Drugs

from the about-time dept

We've had a few posts recently about the growing scandal in the pharma and publishing worlds, whereby big pharma companies would produce fake medical journals with the stamp of approval from big publishing houses, to make it look like their drugs had a lot more scientific support than they really did. To make matters even more insane, often the pharma companies would ghostwrite articles, and then get professors to basically put their names on the works, which were designed to emphasize the benefits of certain drugs, while hiding or de-emphasizing the risks. Copycense points us to the good news that Senator Grassley is at least asking various med schools to explain why this was allowed, while probing how putting professors names on ghostwritten articles is any different than plagiarism.

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Elsevier Reveals More Details About Its Fake Journal Division

from the that-would-be-an-oops dept

Remember how Elsevier and Merck were caught putting out a fake journal that had articles favoring Merck drugs, implying peer reviewed articles that weren't? Soon afterwards, it came out that Elsevier had a whole division for such things. However, following an internal investigation, it looks like Elsevier is backtracking a bit and saying that, while the group's practices were problematic, most weren't as egregious as the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM)" that was created by Merck and Elsevier. Instead, most of the others were sponsored by multiple companies, rather than just one. Still, the company admits that it never should have called the custom publications "journals" and is changing its publication rules -- having editors from its real journals create the guidelines for any custom publication offerings. Either way, this whole episode is a serious black mark on Elsevier and the reputation of any of its journals -- real or "fake."

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Elsevier Had A Whole Division Publishing Fake Medical Journals

from the doesn't-that-make-you-feel-safe? dept

Remember a week ago when we wrote about pharma giant Merck and publishing giant Elsevier working together to publish a fake journal that talked up various Merck drugs and was used by doctors to show that the drugs were safe and useful? Well, you knew the story wouldn't end there, right? Slashdot points us to the discovery that there is actually a whole division at Elsevier that would publish such journals and tried to duck this fact before sort of (but not fully) admitting it:

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.

The pharmaceutical industry, and publishers, as we have repeatedly seen, have serious difficulties in living up to the high standards needed in this field, and bad information in the medical literature leads doctors to make irrational prescribing decisions, which ultimately can cost lives, and cause unnecessary suffering, not to mention the expense.

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Big Publishers Increasingly Experimenting With Free Academic Journals

from the about-time dept

For many years there's been a push to create free research journals in various academic and scientific fields. The reasoning was that the high expense of the traditional journals made new breakthroughs and research much more difficult and expensive, potentially slowing down important advances. There was also some concern about publicly funded research not being available to the public. For a while, the traditional publishers acted horrified at the idea of free journals, but it appears that they're finally realizing the idea might not be so bad. Publishing giant Reed Elsevier is launching a new free medical journal online for oncologists that it hopes to support with advertising. It hopes to sign up a bunch of doctors to use it and may launch other free journals in other medical areas. It's definitely an experiment -- and appears to be driven in part by the growing number of free sources online -- but it's still good to see the big publishing houses not just bashing the idea, but testing it out themselves.

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