Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal
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