More Fake Journals From Elsevier

daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."

Wrong

[an.echte.trilingue]

No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.

Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.

Re:Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info.

That depends on the network you're requesting those pages from. When I'm using my university's VPN, I often actually get the documents that the search result page promises, because my university has a subscription.

Elsevier is probably doing the same for Google's IP addresses, and maybe Google even pays for it.

Re:How I found out about it... (with Simpsons ref)

[mmaniaci]

Scientific Journals cannot be compared to TV documentaries. I'm not familiar with many other fields, but the IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org] and ACM [acm.org] publish journals that are widely used as technical resources in engineering. Journals are not primarily a form of entertainment.

Re:Bad Feeling

[LordKronos]

Try to find incidents of Restless Leg Syndrome (by that name or any other) prior to the advertising campaign. See for yourself how difficult that is

You are right. It's nearly impossible. For instance,

1) Open browser to wikipedia.
2) Search for RLS
3) Scan down to the History section

"Earlier studies were done by Thomas Willis (1622â"1675) and by Theodor Wittmaack.[54] Another early description of the disease and its symptoms were made by George Miller Beard (1839-1883).[54] In a 1945 publication titled 'Restless Legs', Swedish neurologist Karl-Axel Ekbom (1907-1977)[54] described the disease and presented eight cases used for his studies.[55]"

So you are absolutely correct, provided, of course, that you can show us that the advertising campaign for RLS began in the early 1600s or earlier.

Re:Google

[m50d]

Not solving the wider problem, but often you can access such sites by changing user-agent to googlebot ("Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)").