I was thinking about the thing where The Scientist (register to see) blogged that Merck payed Elsevier publish a fake journal, and I was wondering what the two companies were saying about it.

Tidbits:

* Merck claims no foul play (pdf press release). They followed the standards for disclosure that it was sponsored research at the time, and as those standards change, they continue to follow them. ie, “our lies are within the established guidelines for lying”.

* According to the article in The Scientist, Elsevier is acting like ’sponsored journals’ happen all the time, and though things may have been different in the past, Elsevier “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘Journal’.” They don’t list this one as one of their publications. Where is the public statement from Elsevier now that the shit has hit the Slashdot?

* According to Worldcat, one library, the State Library of New South Wales, has this title. I can only imagine that if these were only sent to doctors, then a doctored librarian must have pulled it from the junk mail and decided to have it cataloged. The record doesn’t have an end publication date, which could mean Elsevier is still putting it out, or maybe that no one told the serials catalogers they had stopped. I would be surprised if this thing was cited in Web of Science. Google Scholar gets no hits for the title in quotes.

I had originally started this all as a comment on Anne-Marie’s post, until I realized she was addressing a much broader theme. So I’ll keep my rantalysis local.

All of this has to do with Merck’s ongoing battle in Australian courts to not get sued for giving people heart attacks. Vioxx was taken off the market in 2004, and Wikipedia reports that Merck expects to pay out $4.9 billion (with a b!) to former US customers.

According to articles in the Australian linked from comments in the post on chemistry-blogs.net, it is alleged that Merck made a drug which has the side effect of death, falsified trials of said drug, tried to character-assassinate anyone who found differently, and payed Elsevier/Reed big bucks to publish a fake journal saying it was all good.

I’m going to say that selling the drug that you know kills people is the worst offense here. Talking trash about people who published honest academic inquiry is second worst, and getting in bed with Elsevier limps in with the bronze.

To recap: these people are liars and they’ll do anything to fuck you over if it keeps them rich (allegedly).

And yet, I’m still outraged that anyone messes with scholarly publishing. Sacrecow! Down to earth again, a comment in ‘The Scientist’s post by Godwin Constantine points out:

“Fake journals published by various drug companies is very common in Asia. These journals are circulated free of charge to doctors. They appear in different names and form different fake professional associations. We at the University of Colombo, Faculty of Medicine train our students in EBM and also about journals.”

Colombo is in Sri Lanka, so in other words, in Sri Lanka, print isn’t to be trusted just because it is print and it all boils down to information literacy. I’m not sure I agree. It’s good to scrutinize print in practice, but don’t call it a solution.