Grant, Bob. "Merck Published Fake Journal" The Scientist.com. Posted April 30, 2009. Available at http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/blog.jsp?type=blog&o_url=blog/display/55671&id=55671 (version not requiring free registration: http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/print/55671/). (Accessed 10/25/2009).
Grant, Bob. "Elsevier Published 6 Fake Journals." The Scientist.com. Posted May 8, 2009. Available at http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/blog.jsp?type=blog&o_url=blog/display/55679&id=55679. (Accessed 10/25/2009)
As I was looking around on the ACRLog this week, I came across a blog entry from May of this year popped out at me given this week's readings on trust and authenticity. In a post titled "This Journal Brought to You By...", Barbara Fister writes of how journal publisher Elsevier received money from the pharmaceutical company Merck to publish a journal, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, that was designed to appear like a scholarly, peer-review style journal. Fister's post in turn led me to the two articles written by Bob Grant for The Scientist.com that first exposed the ruse to the blogosphere.
The "journal" appears to have been disseminated to doctors in Australia and many of its contents were summaries or reprints of articles that were favorable toward Merck drugs. (The existence of the fake journal was first reported in the Australian in connection with a lawsuit by a man who suffered a heart attack after using Vioxx). Though it is unlikely that the publication would have fooled researchers, it may have hoodwinked some doctors. According to Grant, Elsevier has since apologized for the publication and has stated that they regret that the journal's sponsorship by Merck had not been made clear (nowhere in the issues Grant reviewed was this sponsorship acknowledged). A spokesman for Merck, Sharp & Dohme Australia (MDSA) explained to Grant that "MSDA understood that Elsevier envisaged the complimentary publication would draw on the vast resources of Elsevier, publishers of many leading peer-reviewed journals including Lancet, Bone, Joint Bone Spine and others, to deliver novel and timely full text articles and abstracts to physicians."
In the second of his articles, Grant uncovered that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was not an aberration, but that Elsevier had in fact between 2000 and 2005 published five other such fake journals--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]. (Other bloggers have suggested that the number may be even higher). These "journals" were published by Elsevier's Australian office under the Excerpta Medica imprint. At the time of Bob Grant's second article, Elsevier had declined to reveal which companies had sponsored these other publications.
From what I can tell--though none of the many blog posts I examined were perfectly clear on this point--the series of "sponsored article publications" (Elsevier's term) appeared either primarily or exclusively in print (analog) form. They were never indexed in Medline and they had no journal websites (though I'm unclear as to whether they ever appeared in Elsevier's online listing of publications). Grant's original article post includes a link to PDFs for Vol. 2, Issue 1 and Issue 2 of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. The reason why I decided to write about what appears to have been a print phenomenon is that it also raises interesting questions regarding trust and authenticity in the digital world. I suspect that if these fake journals had had a real web presence, their status as crypto-advertising would have been exposed much more quickly. That said, both print and digital scholarly communication are affected by several shared trust and authenticity issues. The questions that, in this week's readings, Nancy Van House states are important for establishing a digital library's provenance--"Who designed it, and for what purpose? What design choices were made? Including, what is not visible to the user?"--are precisely those questions whose answers were intentionally obscured in the Elsevier fiasco.
Moreover, it has been interesting to see how this revelation has impacted the debates surrounding Open Access and publisher gate-keeping. As a blogger at Small Gray Matters writes: "The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide." Is scholarly communication (and, by extension, digital curation) too important a function to entrust to commercial entities, like Elsevier or Google, whose bottom line will always be financial?
