Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15814

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Gilling J.
Fake journals undermine academic publishing
Campus Review 2009 May 25
http://www.campusreview.com.au/pages/section/article.php?s=News&idArticle=7333

Full text:

Six fake Australian medical journals produced by academic publishing giant Elsevier have undermined confidence in commercial publishers.

Gavin Moodie, principal policy adviser at Griffith University and an expert on academic integrity, described the scandal as a “timely warning” to universities of the risks inherent in commercial funding.

Between 2000 and 2005, Elsevier produced the six journals under the Excerpta Medica imprint with funding from the pharmaceutical industry. It is believed all six journals were paid for by Merck.

The scandal came to light in the course of civil action in Melbourne last month against Merck’s Australian subsidiary Merck, Sharp and Dohme by Graeme Peterson, who suffered a heart attack in 2003 while on the Merck drug Vioxx. In the second issue of one of the fake journals, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Vioxx is favourably reviewed in nine of the 29 articles.

None of the journals disclose the source of their funding.

Excerpta Medica is an Elsevier company which describes itself as a “strategic medical communications agency” serving the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Still in operation, one of the five “strategic communications solutions” it offers to its clients is “publications planning”.

The six journals were to all appearances respectable, peer-reviewed academic journals but were in fact, as Merck acknowledged in a statement this month, “sponsored article compilation publications that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures”.

Expert witnesses in the Peterson case agreed that a doctor could easily mistake the bone and joint publication for a genuine peer-reviewed journal.

The other five publications were the Australasian Journal of General Practice, Australasian Journal of Neurology, Australasian Journal of Cardiology, Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Moodie, who has written extensively on issues of academic integrity, said there were lessons to be learnt for universities in terms of their commercial activities.

“It’s a timely warning to universities to be very careful with their commercial funding and the activities of their commercial subsidiaries, which might similarly undermine their integrity and credibility,” Moodie said.

“Subscribers maintain their subscriptions to commercial journals because of their quality control, which filters out the large quantities of material of dubious quality or worth which is freely available on the web,” he said.

“But confidence in commercial academic publishers is lost when the world’s biggest commercial publisher of medical and scientific journals and books publishes fake journals reportedly sponsored by a giant pharmaceutical company.”

In the statement, the CEO of Elsevier’s health services division, Michael Hansen, said the practice was regrettable.

He said it was “an isolated practice” which did not reflect the current operations of the company. The staff responsible had long since left the company, he said. A review is currently under way.

Brian Martin, professor of social sciences at Wollongong University and vice-president of Whistleblowers Australia, said the Elsevier case was “a useful reminder of the problems that can arise at all levels in the scientific and academic publishing domains under the corrupting influence of the dollar. Nor should we assume that because only a few publications are totally dodgy, the rest are wholly pure.”

“Advertising revenue and even research grants can influence which areas are chosen as the subject of research, and which are ignored, in ways that are far from transparent.”

Martin said that one measure commercial publishers could take to minimise the risk that their publishing processes are corrupted would be to establish an independent expert oversight committee.

“Even authors should be excluded from such a committee – they’ve got their own barrows to push,” he said.

“Who knows – the publishers may even come to like the arrangement. It would certainly give their products additional respect and credibility.”