Scientific publisher snookered by fake journal paid for by drug company

It sounds fairly dry, academic and dependable -- The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine -- but it turns out that its publisher, Elsevier, the world’s leading scientific publisher allowed itself to be hoodwinked by Merck, the US pharmaceutical group.

According to a story in the Financial Times, the journal was presented as being independent, with an honorary editorial board of academics from Australia and New Zealand. But it contained reprinted articles from other journals concerning Merck’s medicines Fosamax and Vioxx without saying it was funded by the company.

The publication marks a fresh twist in tactics to promote medicines by pharmaceutical companies, which have long provided substantial income to academic journals by paying for large numbers of reprints of articles favourable to their drugs for distribution to doctors.

Elsevier, a worldwide company which has a Canadian division, is part of Reed Elsevier, and also publishes the Lancet the official journal of the British Medical Association and other specialist journals reaching more than 30 million scientists, students and health professionals worldwide. The publisher became aware of the problem after 2005, but it was going on for several years before that. The matter has only now come to light as the result of a court case in Australia. Apparently it was not the only such custom pub masquerading as a scientific journal.

Merck described the publication as a “complimentary journal” containing articles about its drugs from peer-reviewed publications, which mentioned its funding for the studies and a “hypothetical cardiovascular risk” associated with Vioxx.

Four issues of the journal were last week described as a “marketing publication” which could easily be mistaken for a peer-reviewed medical journal by George Jelinek, a doctor, during testimony in a trial in Australia brought by a patient – who had suffered a heart attack after taking Vioxx – suing Merck. The claims were first picked up by The Scientist.

New paperless journal springs from the fallout at the Canadian Medical Association

After last year's ruckus at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, with the editorial team and most of the board resigning, one of the outcomes was expected to be a new journal that the dissenters felt would better serve the medical community. That journal has now been launched. It's called Open Medicine.

The fomer editorial team who resigned -- John Hoey, the editor, and Ann Marie Todkill, the senior editor -- are on the editorial board. The publisher is John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia and the co-editors are Stephen Choi from the University of Ottawa and Anita Palepu of UBC.

The journal is wholly online (i.e. no print edition) and "open access", meaning that the contents will be open to the scholarly community without payment. The journal is seeking sponsorships, which will be acknowledged on the site. Sponsors cannot attach strings to their support and have to sign a pledge not to attempt to influence or interfere with editorial decisions -- one of the key reasons why the above-mentioned dispute took place. (Of course, without the hullaballoo, Open Medicine might not have been launched.)

James Maskalyk, MD, Assistant Professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, an associate editor (currently posted in Abyei, Sudan, with Médecins San Frontières) introduces the new journal with an article called "Why Open Medicine?". It says, in part...

To an important degree, the impetus to launch Open Medicine arose from widespread dismay in the Canadian and international medical community over one such attempt to suppress open discussion and restrict the scope of health care discourse. Further, too much of the revenue that sustains medical journals comes from pharmaceutical advertising that attempts to influence physicians into making decisions based on brand recognition rather than on discerning scholarship.

Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people's lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago. Paper and postage are simply too expensive. The landscape is different today. An ideal medical journal — a truly open one — is not only within our sight, it is within our reach.

Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It will be paperless and available without charge or any other barrier to access online. We will publish peer-reviewed science and analysis as well as clinical articles. We will provide a forum for informed and inclusive debates on medicine and its application. Open Medicine will be independent of any commercial publisher or association ownership — it will be "owned" by all who read and contribute to it — and will take no advertisements from companies selling pharmaceuticals or medical devices. We will rely on voluntarism, donations and ethical advertising. Any revenue will be used to improve our ability to meet the needs of our readers and contributors.

See story from CBC website.