Publishing company Elsevier is revising its policies and procedures for partnering with pharmaceutical companies to create custom publications in response to recent media attention over a fake journal, called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM), created by the company and paid for by Merck.
Elsevier provided The Scientist with the names of additional custom publications produced by the company's Australia office from 2000-2005, that an Elsevier spokesperson admitted "should not have been called 'journals'." According to Elsevier, these other publications differed from AJBJM in that they were not sponsored by a single corporation, but were instead paid for by selling "clearly-marked" advertisements purchased by several pharmaceutical companies.
Like AJBJM, the additional publications did not contain original research. Sponsors had some editorial input, but not as much as Merck had over AJBJM, the spokesperson said. "We don't have any indication that any one of our advertisers or sponsors had the level of sponsor-editorial control that existed in [AJBJM]." ...
The company now states that it plans to craft new guidelines regarding these practices by the end of June. "Elsevier will review practices related to all article reprint, compilation or custom publications and set out guidelines on content, permission, use of imprint and repackaging to ensure that such publications are not confused with Elsevier's core peer reviewed journals and that the sponsorship of any publication is clearly disclosed," the company said in a statement released today (June 4)....
Like AJBJM, the other journals in this series -- the company added three more titles to those it listed in May -- contain no original, peer-reviewed research and consist largely of reprinted articles, and summaries of previously published research papers. Unlike AJBJM, however, which was sponsored only by Merck, with the pharmaceutical company heavily influencing the editorial content of the journal, the other titles were bought through ad sales to a multitude of pharma companies, the names of which Elsevier declined to disclose....
Elsevier declined to reveal how much Merck paid to have AJBJM published. "As a matter of policy, we don't discuss the details of specific transactions with our customers," the Elsevier spokesperson said. But the publisher did reveal a range of how many copies of the nine journals were distributed in Australia. "Single issues were typically distributed to between 2,000 and 10,000 general practitioners (GP) in Australia, and the company is aware of one issue that went to 20,000 (the estimated total number of GPs in Australia)," today's Elsevier statement reads....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
