Demerits to Elsevier
Merck joined with Elsevier to publish several issues of a "fake" journal of bone disease and physiology, called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine back in 2003-2004. The journal placed advertisements for Fosamax and Vioxx, two Merck products, among reprints from journals such as Lancet, and opinion pieces talking about medical conditions that might benefit from Merck's products. Not only is this last week's news, no, six years ago news, but it's news neither shocking or revelatory in the worlds of pharmaceutical marketing and science publishing.
Looking at the PDFs of a couple of AJBJM journals -- here, and here, I can't say I would confuse this publication with a "real" medical journal, although I'm not so silly to think that some people I know wouldn't, probably the same ones who thought an newspaper editorial on MRSA was "new research". But for a semi-observant reader, what introduction to a medical journal from the Associate Editor, opposite the list of "Honorary Editorial Board" members, reads like this?
"Hopefully, the recent call by the US Preventive Services Task Force for routine screening for women aged 65 and older will help promote the local Australian lobby on osteoporosis initiatives. Among other things on the lobbyists' agenda are a wider availability of Medicare Benefits Schedule rebates on bone densitometry items and drugs under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme."
If you were a doctor (to whom the journal was targeted), would you confuse recycled content and a mission statement about the promotion of "lobbyists' agenda" as typical medical journal intro? Clearly this was little more than an advertising circular. Shame on you Elsevier, you fine, upstanding company! How could you?
Sullying Science
You'll erode your brand! Erode science! They. Really? Which one brand? In addition to it's other products, Elsevier publishes about 1,900 books and about 2,000 journals a year -- anything from Neuron, to Annals of Tourism Research to Pump Industry Analyst. Elsevier is a publishing powerhouse, and I'm sure other content from those 2000 journals would crumple under close scrutiny, if people looked more than once every six years.
And Merck -- "Where Patients Come First"? How could you? You strain our patience. Just kidding. This incident -- which Elsevier amusingly defended by noting it happened long ago when different standards held for journalism -- is neither unusual nor unprecedented behavior.
"Real" medical journals are also pressured if not beholden or subservient to pharmaceutical advertising, as we wrote a few years ago in "Just The Facts....mmm....No! Not THOSE Facts : Science Reporting in Medical Journals". In addition to advertising that influences the outcome of medical journals, pharmaceutical money is used to influence scientific, as excellently documented by the New York Times over the past couple of years for psychology research.
Nor did Merck break new ground by publishing it's own little research vanity mag. A couple of years ago Acronym Required wrote about the company Science International Inc., that the US government contracted with to evaluate chemical risks to infants and children for the NIH Department of Toxicology. SII clients also included Dupont, W.R. Grace, and Exxon Mobil, and the company published its own research in its own journal called Risk Analysis.
Some have warned that this shameful "Australasian" science journal will make all the fake doctors come crawling out of the woodwork. It won't. This has been going on forever. Nor does this prove that the non-profit publishing model is the answer, as some have also suggested. There are many ways for ways for pharmaceutical companies to surreptitiously sell their products and advocate policies that benefit them, and non-profit is by no means immune to such manipulation. No the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine is only the tip of the iceberg.
