Mercky business

Turns out the Elsevier-owned Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine contained a selection of reprinted articles from other journals concerning Mercks medicines Fosamax and Vioxx,with no disclosure that it was funded by the company. In other words,Elsevier tried to pass off Merck marketing as a serious,peer-reviewed journal. Though of course,this isnt the first time Elsevier has been caught in dodgy business for instance,the editor of its Chaos,Solitons and Fractals,included about 322 of his own articles in the journal.

The journal industry is highly consolidated. Springer and Reed Elsevier own stables of journals across disciplines,and dictate terms to the academic community. Traditionally,they play a useful role linking the producers,referees and consumers of academic content; theyve also milked this situation to the fullest,according to the Association of Research Libraries in the US from 1986 to 2004,their expenditure on journals has risen 273 per cent. Inflation rose 73 per cent over the same period. Naturally,universities and libraries hate their guts. A couple of years back,the entire editorial board of an Elsevier math journal quit in protest. In France,the École Normale Supérieure has stopped publishing with Elsevier.

This isnt good business sense. Empowered by digital technology,many universities have teamed up to cut these behemoths out of the loop altogether through open-access journals and institutional repositories to pool and circulate their collective work. But academic publishers have stuck with their much-detested model,claiming that open-access models cannot match the rigour and credibility of their journals. Thats getting harder and harder to believe. Since the impression of trustworthiness is the only thing keeping their outmoded business model in place,Elsevier has certainly hammered a hefty nail in its own coffin with this incident.