Merck and Elsevier publish fake peer-reviewed journal
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 3, 2009 12:44 AM | permalink
Pharmaceutical giant Merck paid science publishing juggernaut Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed scientific journal, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

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.

Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal (via /.)

There is no way they don’t know how wrong this is. It’s time to start warning all the faculty, although they’ll never remember the title.

Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing Boing:

This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan. He’s 13, he’s holding a game controller and looking at a glowing screen and he’s doing what he does a lot of — diving into digital realms of adventure.

His latest favourite game is Call of Duty – which he plays on-line with his friends. Evan’s wanting to play C of D was something of a challenge for us. It’s rated T and he’s only just a teenager and point and shoot first person games worry me some. Evan is relentlessly reasonable sometimes — he outlined why he wanted to play the game and he was pretty upfront why he knew my “parent-sense” would start tingling. So I had to be reasonable too. I looked at the game. I’ve done a lot of research for military museums so I could tell that the content was accurate — but there was lots of shooting and blowing things up. But there was a fair bit of that during World War II. So it was undeniable that Evan was experiencing history and there was this teamwork factor…

So we compromised. Well, sort of.

I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.

We’ll see how it goes, but Evan keeps his word. Especially about his games.

This is a great example of using games as an opportunity for education.

Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House’s new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that’s not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House’s embrace of Drupal is momentous:

Open-source software is the most cost-effective and often the most user-friendly option for academic and educational users but central IT groups are usually too wedded to Windows and afraid of the unknown to look at them.

Having such a visible use of open-source software from a traditionally technology conservative source should hopefully speed up its acceptance by the mainstream.

Sarah Boseley, Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline pledges cheap medicine for world’s poor, The Guardian, February 13, 2009.

The world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap drugs to millions of people in the developing world.

In a major change of strategy, the new head of GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, has told the Guardian he will slash prices on all medicines in the poorest countries, give back profits to be spent on hospitals and clinics and – most ground-breaking of all – share knowledge about potential drugs that are currently protected by patents. …

He said that GSK will: …

* Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a “patent pool”, so they can be explored by other researchers. …

The extent of the changes Witty is setting in train is likely to stun drug company critics and other pharmaceutical companies …

Comment. The changes are stunning. It’s a remarkable about-face from an industry that has been perhaps the most outspoken advocate of the sanctity of patents. In the news so far, there’s no word of any information that will become OA (in our sense) that wasn’t previously, but it may be an indicator of a willingness to experiment with sharing, even in fields that were previously most resistant.

Update. See also this follow-up from The Guardian (thanks to Thiru Balasubramaniam):

… Transparency is a major issue. Witty has pledged to publish all clinical trial data, whether positive or negative – and be open about GSK’s payments to doctors. …

Thought someone might find this useful – it’s the styleguide we use for my library’s digital branch! It’s a long document, broken up into these sections:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Marcia Hofmann has a report card on transparent government measures undertaken by the Obama administration on its first day in office. The news is pretty damned good: they’ve reversed Ashcroft’s restrictions on Freedom of Information Act requests as well as changes to the Presidential Records Act, and have adopted general principles on transparency and open government.

Content Analyst as Content Strategist

If your content strategist is detail-obsessed, she is a content analyst. The most prevalent content strategist working today has a background in library or information sciences. She functions most comfortably at the level of content as data, not copy (see above) nor product (see below). With a focus on metadata, taxonomy, the semantic web, and search engine optimization (SEO), the content analyst thrives in sifting large data sets, providing strategies to corral, deploy, and manage the content in an orderly or seductive fashion.

In response to a reader who asked him why he was sticking up for a manga collector whose comics included depictions of underage sex, Neil Gaiman responds with a reasoned, intelligent, and convincing article about the problems of legal limits on speech. First they came for the manga — what’s next?