And the hits just keep on coming …We talked a few days ago about the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a peer reviewed medical journal that was not peer reviewed, not very medically authoritative and not much of a journal.
Today it got worse.
From: The Scientist [7th May 2009].
Elsevier put out a total of seven publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship
[...]
six other titles in a “series of sponsored article publications” were put out by [the Australian office of Elsevier] and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005. These titles were: the Australasian Journal of General Practice, the Australasian Journal of Neurology, the Australasian Journal of Cardiology, the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint.
So where are corporate ethics and responsibility? In any of these companies? (the other 6 companies have not been disclosed yet).
At the very least, one has to look at the people who cooked up this scheme. Gee, let’s pay someone else to publish a pretend journal to influence doctors by distorting the facts and pretending to have data we don’t.
Then let’s look at the people at Elsevier. Let’s accept some money for producing a fake peer review journal that doesn’t. Let’s lend our good corporate name to it.
Then let’s look at the people above these schemers, all the way up to the top, who failed to maintain enough oversight or else to fail to enforce it, who didn’t notice notice or didn’t stop this fairly clear ethical violation.
To me, this is the same kind of lack of corporate responsibility we see over and over again in recent history. The bad mortgages, the repackaging of low grade debt and calling it wonderful, safe debt. Where was the corporate responsibility in all this?
[update: the number was originally published by The Scientist as 7, but later revised down to 6]