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More Fake Journals From Elsevier
daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."
According to their wikipeia entry, they are entirely legit.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
... not a damn thing will become of it because everyone who can do anything about it is in Merck's pocket.
Interesting. This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy, and is one more reason to ditch money-grubbing publishers for open-access journals.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal, but still...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not. Does that not constitute fraud? Would there not be an option to have the publisher and the pharmacorp charged with fraud?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Behold!
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
I'm not a doctor or any sort of medical practitioner. So, the following is just my personal opinion.
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind. Seeing the way this industry operates made me decide some time ago that I can't in any good conscience join up with them, fascinating though the subject may be.
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people. That's why you have so many "designer diseases" like Restless Leg Syndrome. Just think about how many people you know who do not regularly take some sort of prescription medication; they are becoming a minority. No one really questions this. No one with any sort of media presence is asking whether the fact that the general population is getting sicker and not healthier indicates that our medical system is fundamentally broken. Of course, you don't have to be much of a thinking man to realize that the media is not your friend, otherwise they'd ask questions like this and would go wherever the facts lead them, monied interests be damned.
I was in my doctor's office once and I asked his staff a question. I asked her why it is that pharmaceutical companies advertise prescription-only medicines to the general public, since after all you are supposed to ask your doctor what is wrong and have that doctor determine what medicine you need. There's little room in that process for brand recognition on the part of the patient. She flat-out told me "because the pharmaceutical companies RUN this entire industry". I salute the honesty of her answer. I was half expecting some sort of "party line" on that one.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind.
Nonphysical intangible mind?
Neurochemicals, man. Read about them. Any intro to psych course includes education on what a few of the major neurochemicals do and their role in defining who "you" are.
This is MAJOR fraud in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. Merck and Elsevier need to be shut completely down for this bullshit.
Or, alternatively, start killing off Merck and Elsevier CEOs, NOW. Send the message that we will not tolerate this misleading information.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.
Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
That's why you have so many "designer diseases" like Restless Leg Syndrome.
I have been diagnosed with that "designer disease", you dickwad. How did the doctor determine that I have Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS)? I have had two sleep studies at a local hospital. During the studies, dozens of electrodes connected to my body monitored everything from my brain waves to the movement of my calf muscles. The summary reports from the sleep studies show that I shift between different stages of sleep much more frequently than "normal" people. While reviewing the results of the first sleep study with me, the doctor pointed to a section of the sleep stage vs. time graph and said that I moved my legs 66 times per hour and awoke 22 times per hour. I don't get restful sleep like "normal" people because my legs move while I am asleep. The sleep doc that I was working with did not fabricate those results just to sell me more Requip or Mirapex.
Please stick your "designer disease" comment for RLS up your ass.
Thank you,
-Scott
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind.
Nonphysical intangible mind?
Neurochemicals, man. Read about them. Any intro to psych course includes education on what a few of the major neurochemicals do and their role in defining who "you" are.
Why do people insist on giving me the most simplistic of answers, always with the assumption that I never once came across them in any research on the subject? I'm not trying to complain so much as to point out that it's not necessary.
To say that "the entire mystery is completely rendered moot by the concept of neurochemicals!" is the same thing as saying "I am a materialist." If you are so inclined, and if you find that satisfying, then good for you. Not everyone subscribes to the materialist worldview, and not everyone is willing to make the assumptions that are needed in order to honestly believe in it.
In other words, to really give a satisfying answer to that mystery from a materialist perspective, you would have to flawlessly explain what consciousness is, precisely why particular arrangements of protons and electrons and neutrons bring it about, and why other arrangements of matter are not conscious (or for an interesting twist, why consciousness is an inherent property of all matter and highly ordered organisms are just a particularly refined expression of it).
If you study pharmacology you will find none of those things. You mentioned neurochemicals. Go ahead and study them. What you will find is descriptions in terms of "well, when chemical X is ingested and reaches part Y of the brain, the patient reports Z." That does not begin to resolve any of the mysteries I mentioned. The explanations based on neurotransmitters, agonists, antagonists, receptors, etc. are just sophisticated forms of that same description. To begin to act like we have this all figured out is frankly rather silly. To think that you can answer the question I raised with the equivalent of a soundbite is to fail to appreciate the magnitude of this mystery.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier....
There are few institutions which can or do afford all packages. Intead, they must choose one or the other. Like with the cable channels, the publishers aren't about to put all the "good" journals in one set and all the crap "journals" and advertisements in another.
Some journals and, thus, packages become must-have. And journals in the other packages become sidelined. And, because journals specialize, you get the subsequent marginalization of various topics and even fields of research.
That's on top of the veto power big business has on reearch funding. Remeber the US government may apportion grants, but since much of the money is coming from private business, it gets to select only from a subset of acceptable recipients and topics. e.g. OpenBSD: secure systems for less than the price of a cruise missile...
I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info.
That depends on the network you're requesting those pages from. When I'm using my university's VPN, I often actually get the documents that the search result page promises, because my university has a subscription.
Elsevier is probably doing the same for Google's IP addresses, and maybe Google even pays for it.
I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.
The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.
--- I do not moderate.
Scientific Journals cannot be compared to TV documentaries. I'm not familiar with many other fields, but the IEEE Spectrum and ACM publish journals that are widely used as technical resources in engineering. Journals are not primarily a form of entertainment.
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people.
They also can't make any profit off the majority of sick people in the world, either, because those people have no money. That's how you get situations like this:
We found that, of 1393 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 1999, only 16 were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis. (Trouiller et al., "Drug Development for Neglected Diseases: a Deficient Market and a Public-Health Policy Failure." The Lancet 359, no. 9324 (June 22, 2002): 2188-2194.
(Ironically, I got that through ScienceDirect). Yet while the pharma giants won't focus R&D on neglected diseases, they'll also lobby against any attempts to set up alternative incentive systems designed to stimulate research into those disease... probably too afraid that the alternatives will be more successful than the current patent system, and people will start to wonder why more drugs can't be developed that way.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Well some of the biggest Physics frauds were published in Nature and Science. So Impact factor, which is set by a company without peer review, is not in fact a good measure of the articles in the journal. Hell IIRC Science even had a homeopathy article in it once.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
>Now I have already said that this is my personal opinion and I am not a medical practitoner.
Great. Thanks for letting everyone know that you are not a specialist in sleep disorders. So your opinion regarding medications used to treat sleep disorders holds as much weight as my opinion on how well someone speaks French (a topic I know absolutely nothing about).
Here is my opinion: You are still a dickwad.
Please continue to insert your comment about RLS being a "designer disease" into the orifice I mentioned in my previous message.
Thank you,
-Scott
Try to find incidents of Restless Leg Syndrome (by that name or any other) prior to the advertising campaign. See for yourself how difficult that is. Then you will see that it's not some malady that has plagued mankind over the years for which we finally have a treatment.
Having slept with someone who was tormented by this for months, I can assure you that it is quite real, whatever it is. It's possible that it was much rarer (or nonexistent) prior to 1900, but that's hardly proof that it doesn't exist now.
Your argument was going okay until you introduced this howler...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I spent a few weeks working for them at one of their warehouses. In the employee manual there were dates for Christmas, and Christmas Eve. The dates were the 25 and 26 respectively. If they can't even get the dates for Christmas right at a text book publisher, I don't want to know what else they fail at.
Calm down Scott. Please take your meds.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You also seem to suffer from Restless Mouth Syndrome (RMS). I suggest yo try some BSD.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
You don't have to be afraid. Just come out and say it: "I do believe in god"
The problem with that is you then have to explain what "God" means to you. My personal concept of that is quite unlike many of the more mainstream interpretations, though (perhaps because I have studied most major religions) it will sound very much like some of them. That makes this a thorny issue that is likely to create much confusion. Really, I was content with showing the limitations of the materialist worldview and I would greatly prefer that each individual works out for themselves whether they believe in God and what "God" means to them. I have always felt that such things, in their pure form, can only be a personal quest and are not something that another man can give to you, though he may be able to show you the way of arriving at your own understanding. Nowhere in this do you find a motivation of fear, my friend.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're confusing two different discussions.
The first is that the number of diagnosed and treated cases of RLS has gone up significantly since advertising campaigns began. The other is that RLS is diagnosed when it shouldn't be.
It's quite possible that RLS was historically written off as blanket "sleeplessness" before. Now we're able to identify and treat it. This would be the result of a completely normal and legitimate evolution in our ability to practice medicine, not necessarily the result of us fabricating some "designer disease". Otherwise, at one time you could make identical arguments about any common affliction, claiming it's really just bad spirits, not some made-up disease.
It's ALSO quite possible that too many people are diagnosed with RLS that don't have it. Or not. The important part is that they're two different statements, and that difference is whether or not you can infer a massive conspiracy.
I used to call them "Elsewhere Science". Has it turned out to be a correct description?
>You have absolutely no reason to hate me
/. saying that you think RLS is a "designer disease". You are spreading mis-information that could potentially have a negative affect on someone who is searching the web for info on RLS. I don't want a person to read your "opinion" and think that you actually know what you are talking about.
Actually, I do have a reason: You posted a message on
>for if you do that, the suffering is yours and does not affect me in the slightest.
Do you do this passive-aggressive shit all the time? It's slightly annoying.
>I'll give you some friendly advice.
Free advice is often worth exactly what you pay for it...
>calmly explain to that person why you believe they are misinformed. You may even convince them.
I don't want to convince you that you are wrong. You are a nutcase and you are spreading mis-information that may have a negative effect on someone else's health. I suppose you are also anti-vaccination because the guvmint uses the annual flu vaccines for mind control.
>What you're doing here, however, has no chance of working.
And, once again, you are presenting your opinion. Personally, I think you are a douchebag and I don't care what you think will or will not work. My only concern is that your comments will harm someone else who reads them.
Skeptics have throwing out a variety of reasons that open-access journals like PLoS will never work. One of those reasons is that traditional print journals have a lot of prestige, just based on their centuries of momentum. Scientists won't want to publish in upstart open-access journals, according to this argument, because nobody will take their publications seriously. Well, this scandal would seem to show that you can't trust a journal just because it comes from a centuries-old publishing house.
In my experience, the prestige is based on journal titles, not publisher. No one respects publications because they're carried by elsevier, they respect them because of the journal title. Not sure if nature is elsevier, but if it came out that 90% of elsevier's publications were fraud like this, researchers would still reguard Nature highly and want to publish in it.
So no, this doesn't elevate open-access journals because it doesn't knock down the established journals.
Science is like an Easter egg hunt where there are too many kids and not enough eggs. Everybody is trying to pad their c.v. with as many papers as possible, in order to land one of those prized research jobs. Because of this, there's been a huge proliferation of small, specialized, low-quality, expensive journals, and that's been creating a lot of problems for librarians.
Well, I feel a little sorry for those librarians, but the other thing, the padding the CV, is one reason why employers, tenure comittees, and researchers value the higher-impact journals, and why open-access journals are going to take a while. The researchers who run the academic research system aren't yet used to thinking of open-access journals as being just as respectable as the older journals, the value system to sort out someone who has published all fluff based on journals published in will continue for at least another generation of scientists.
Schools should also eliminate their weaker graduate programs, e.g., if Cal State Fresno (hypothetically) has a graduate program in Italian, but it's not in the top 100 Italian programs in the U.S., maybe they should just cut it; it's not doing anyone any good for them to be handing out some tiny number of master's degrees and pretending that their faculty are doing high-powered research.
What would that solve? It might cut down on the education creep (ie a graduate degree is becoming the equivalent of a college degree a decade ago) but that's not a huge problem, and closing a program means any good researchers in the program have problems. There is actually good research coming out of graduate programs that on average are pretty mediocre.
R&D is not the only major cost involved with new drugs. Regulatory hurdles are enormous as well.
Yes, but not as enormous as lobbyists and kickbacks to politicians or marketing.
You are right. It's nearly impossible. For instance,
1) Open browser to wikipedia.
2) Search for RLS
3) Scan down to the History section
"Earlier studies were done by Thomas Willis (1622â"1675) and by Theodor Wittmaack.[54] Another early description of the disease and its symptoms were made by George Miller Beard (1839-1883).[54] In a 1945 publication titled 'Restless Legs', Swedish neurologist Karl-Axel Ekbom (1907-1977)[54] described the disease and presented eight cases used for his studies.[55]"
So you are absolutely correct, provided, of course, that you can show us that the advertising campaign for RLS began in the early 1600s or earlier.
Not solving the wider problem, but often you can access such sites by changing user-agent to googlebot ("Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)").
I am trolling
Everyone who has conducted legitimate science, or expanded their medical knowledge, based on reading and/or referencing the fake journals, has been disserviced. The false information has been passed along and may continue since not all readers/users could ever be located. Science and medicine have been poisoned by this, and the damage can multiply. The publisher should print a final edition of each, containing only one article, saying that all previous work printed there is suspect at best. The problem could be somewhat mitigated if the editors of every other journal reviewed the articles they've printed to see if they contain references to those journals, and request the author(s) examine them for possible revision removing same. When the authors are no longer reachable the editors should do it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
who has published something in an Elsevier Journal (they publish a lot of conference series), i am personnaly disappointed. I wonder if it is possible to retract that article and republish it somewhere else.