It’s a busy time here, with George Mason University graduation and also moving to Rhode Island soon, but I had to share this shocking story.
The Scientist article (free registration required)
The Bioethics Blog post
Nature.com Writeup of the incident
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.
Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored.
The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews, most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal — which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica — neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication.
So Merck, a pharmaceutical company, paid Elsevier, a huge publisher of legitimate peer-reviewed journals, to publish what essentially was an advertisement in the form of a real journal. The only possible goal in doing that would be to sell more Merck drugs. Which is the job of Merck’s marketing department.
Elsevier, however, has a reputation to maintain as a publisher of rigorous research. They are already disliked for keeping copyright on the articles they publish and making it expensive to access those articles, and now this just exemplifies their greed.
 |
This news is extremely disappointing for all parties involved, and certain casts a pall on Elsevier’s reputation. Which is disappointing because one of my journal articles is published in an Elsevier journal It also does no favors for Big Pharma either. |
