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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
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!
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.
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
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...
Calm down Scott. Please take your meds.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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