[Jose's Note: What started as a report of Elsevier publishing a fake scientific journal for Merck has now expanded to Elsevier acknowledging the publication of at least six such fake journals.]
..The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a “hit list” of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as “neutralise”, “neutralised” and “discredit” next to the names of various doctors.
“We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live,” said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up. Institutions might think about whether they wish to receive money from a company like that in future. Worse still, is the revelation that Merck paid the publisher Elsevier to produce a publication.
..The real tragedy is that the cost of distorted information, and irrational prescribing, is far greater than the cost of the research that could prevent it. Health systems pay for these drugs – state-funded in almost every single developed country – and they largely pay for the journals, too. In a sensible world, countries would band together and pay for comparative research themselves, and the free, open distribution of the results, to prevent all this nonsense.
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http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/
Elsevier published 6 fake journals
Posted by Bob Grant
[Entry posted at 7th May 2009 04:27 PM GMT]
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.
Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored.
The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews, most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal –which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica– neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication.
An Elsevier spokesperson told The Scientist in an email that a total of six titles in a “series of sponsored article publications” were put out by their Australia office 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 [Medicine]. Elsevier declined to provide the names of the sponsors of these titles, according to the company spokesperson.
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures,” said Michael Hansen, CEO of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division, in a statement issued by the company. “This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.” {Full statement at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01203}
When confronted with the questionable publishing practices surrounding the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine last week, Elsevier indicated that it had no plans of looking into the matter further, but that decision has apparently been reversed.
“We are currently conducting an internal review but believe this was an isolated practice from a past period in time,” Hansen continued in the Elsevier statement. “It does not reflect the way we operate today. The individuals involved in the project have long since left the company. I have affirmed our business practices as they relate to what defines a journal and the proper use of disclosure language with our employees to ensure this does not happen again.”
“I understand this issue has troubled our communities of authors, editors, customers and employees,” Hansen added in the statement. “But I can assure all that the integrity of Elsevier’s publications and business practices remains intact.”
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Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01203
It’s a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.
The Scientist has reported that, yes, it’s true, Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.
What’s wrong with this is so obvious it doesn’t have to be argued for. What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!
These kinds of endeavors are not possible without help. One of The Scientist’s most notable finds is a Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks who served on the “honorary advisory board” of this “journal”. His take: “I don’t think it’s fair to say it was totally a marketing journal”, apparently on the grounds that it had excerpts from peer-reviewed papers. However, in his entire time on the board he never received a single paper for peer-review, but because he apparently knew the journal did not receive original submissions of research. This didn’t seem to bother him one bit. Such “throwaways” of non-peer reviewed publications and semi-marketing materials are commonplace in medicine. But wouldn’t that seem odd for an academic journal? Apparently not. Moreover, Peter Brooks had a pretty lax sense of academic ethics any way: he admitted to having his name put on a “advertorial” for pharma within the last ten years, says The Scientist. An “advertorial”? Again, language unfamiliar to us in the academic publishing world, but apparently quite familiar to the pharmaceutical publishing scene.
It is this attitude within companies like Merck and among doctors that allows scandals precisely like this to happen. While the scandals with Merck and Vioxx are particularly egregious, we know they are not isolated incidents. This one is just particularly so. If physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist. What doctors would have as available data would be peer-reviewed research and what pharmaceutical companies produce from their marketing departments–actual advertisements.
Summer Johnson, PhD
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bad-science-medical-journals-companies
The danger of drugs – and data
* Ben Goldacre
* The Guardian, Saturday 9 May 2009
A fascinating court case in Australia has been playing out around some people who had heart attacks after taking the Merck drug ÂVioxx. This medication turned out to increase the risk of heart attacks in people taking it, although that finding was arguably buried in their research, and Merck has paid out more than £2bn to 44,000 people in America – however, they deny any fault.
British users of the drug have had their application for legal aid rejected, incidentally: the health minister, Ivan Lewis, promised to help them, but documents obtained by the Guardian last week showed that within hours Merck launched an expensive lobbying effort that convinced the minister to back off.
This is a shame, because court cases can be tremendously revealing.
The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a “hit list” of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as “neutralise”, “neutralised” and “discredit” next to the names of various doctors.
“We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live,” said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up. Institutions might think about whether they wish to receive money from a company like that in future. Worse still, is the revelation that Merck paid the publisher Elsevier to produce a publication.
The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous. Any industry with global revenues of $600bn can afford to buy quite a lot of adverts, and pharmaceutical companies also buy glossy expensive “reprints” of the trials it feels flattered by. As we noted in this column two months ago, there is evidence that all this money distorts editorial decisions.
This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.
In a statement to The Scientist magazine, Elsevier at first said the company “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘journal’”. I would like to expand on this Âstatement: It was a collection of academic journal articles, published by the academic journal publisher Elsevier, in an academic Âjournal-shaped package. Perhaps if it wasn’t an academic journal they could have made this clearer in the title which, I should have mentioned, was named: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.
Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. “This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place,” he said.
The pharmaceutical industry, and publishers, as we have repeatedly seen, have serious difficulties in living up to the high standards needed in this field, and bad information in the medical literature leads doctors to make irrational prescribing decisions, which ultimately can cost lives, and cause unnecessary suffering, not to mention the expense.
It has been estimated it would take 700 hours a month to read the thousands of academic articles relevant to a GP; doctors skim, they take shortcuts, they rely on summaries, or worse. We could perform better when giving them information, but for now, it will often be “actually, I think I’ve seen at least two studies on that, and in different journals”.
The real tragedy is that the cost of distorted information, and irrational prescribing, is far greater than the cost of the research that could prevent it. Health systems pay for these drugs – state-funded in almost every single developed country – and they largely pay for the journals, too. In a sensible world, countries would band together and pay for comparative research themselves, and the free, open distribution of the results, to prevent all this nonsense.
We do not live in a sensible world.