Also, I’m talking about my field- which evidently is rather different from yours. All the work you mention- apart from resetting Word documents which doesn’t exist for us- is done by the academic editor or the reviewer who isn’t paid by the publishing house.

@robin There’s another point I just thought of:
a journal gains its standing and importance more through the decisions of authors (to submit or not submit their best articles to that journal) than through the decisions of departments to buy or not buy the journal. To be clear- if enough very good articles are being sent to a given journal then it’s very difficult for any library to unsubscribe. This means that changes in journal rankings etc. have to organised by a community-wide coherent campaign and the people who have to take actions (authors) are not the same as the people most aware of the problems (librarians trying to balance budgets.)

I’m an astronomer. We also use LaTeX to typeset our own stuff (though admittedly the journals like to make a mess of it afterwards) and the most widely used method of distribution is arXiv. Nonetheless papers are only taken seriously once they have been accepted by one of the major journals. So that the organising of the peer review process is all that the journals really contribute.

The main American journal (ApJ) has a page charge for authors while the main European (A&A) and the main British journal (MNRAS) just charge exorbitant prices for their paper and electronic journals. The latter approach is clearly unsustainable since every single paper from the last decade or so and all the important ones from earlier decades are available on arXiv for gratis.

Finally, the mathematicians who have started an independent journal of topology might be at risk if Elsevier closes down their suddenly-unprofitable journal: ‘closing down’ as in deleting all the files, ending the provision of reprints and – in a nightmare scenario – suing anyone who infringes their copyright.

You seem to be confusing the editors of the journal with the authors who were published in it. The scenario you envisage seems unlikely, anyway. Elsevier charges for online access to old editions of Topology – so it’s still making them money, even though it’s defunct.

That said, your prediction has already come true.

But the next question is: how far does the rot go? Will these doctors’ professional association support them against a major sponsor? Would the researchers’ parent institutions dare take an action that might result in the fiscal catastrophe of a drop in publications by every single researcher, in every single faculty?

Also: what will happen to the academics and the doctors who have lucrative positions in the fanzine industry? They are probably quite senior: what part will they have in the decisions that follow?

Finally, the mathematicians who have started an independent journal of topology might be at risk if Elsevier closes down their suddenly-unprofitable journal: ‘closing down’ as in deleting all the files, ending the provision of reprints and – in a nightmare scenario – suing anyone who infringes their copyright.

What will happen to these mathematicians when no-one’s citing their previously-published work?

Yes, that kind of action would be unethical, irrational, self-defeating and self-destructive; but that’s no guarantee that it won’t happen!

It would be entertaining (but on reflection, deeply unfunny) for readers of Bad Science to contribute their own speculations as to what actions a giant publishing company might pursue, from whispering campaigns all the way up to supervillains stroking a white cat and launching missiles from the secret island fortress while Ben Goldacre thrashes around in the pirahna pool.

But here’s one cast-iron prediction: they will do something stupid.

@Teapot and others – Journals only steal copyright if you let ‘em. As Micheal Barr notes, chances are if you tell them you’re making it freely available, they’ll let you. The copyright of an article is yours to do with as you wish. And I think your librarian was probably talking about Open Access.

As many have pointed out the current system, where we do the work, edit the journals and referee the papers and then at the last minute the publishing companies come in and steal the copyright, is very strange indeed. In mathematical subjects the publishing companies add literally nothing, as we all typeset it ourselves in Latex anyway and the hard copies are increasingly redundant. The news about the topology journal is very encouraging, and is IMHO clearly the way to go.

However, maths subjects are generally low-volume and we also seem to be atypically collaborative in the way we work (pure maths especially), so this sort of thing is probably better for us than most other subject areas.

Not only that, but decline in publishing companies might even make things worse, as it might then be easier for Big Pharma etc to get away with such pseudo-journals as the ones recorded here.

One of our librarians recently said that she’d been to a conference on this open-source publishing etc and reckoned that change was coming sooner rather than later. Any librarians who can comment on this?

“surely it is not beyond their organisational capability to fund properly qualified people to do precisely that and sort of the wheat from the chaff. It is surely possible to produce more digestible forms than original research papers.”

There is this:

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/about_us.htm

The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) is part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and is a department of the University of York. CRD, which was established in 1994, is one of the largest groups in the world engaged exclusively in evidence synthesis in the health field. The Centre comprises experienced health researchers, medical information specialists, health economists and a dissemination team.

CRD undertakes systematic reviews evaluating the research evidence on health and public health questions of national and international importance. The findings of CRD reviews are widely disseminated and have impacted on health care policy and practice, both in the UK and internationally.

We produce the DARE, NHS EED and HTA databases which are used extensively by health professionals, policy makers and researchers around the world.

In fact, it would be useful if there was a system that allowed us to note relevant opinions given elsewhere on the World Wide Web, our own or other people’s, not by copying the whole text into a different forum but just by presenting an “anchor” or “locator” code that could be used to retrieve the new document. If there was a way to provide a “link” to another Web page. I have an idea for that in fact, use a particular unique phrase from the article “inside quote marks” and input it into Google, and there you have it. And you can copy the address bar from your Google visit into text:
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=%22These+quite+numerous+CROS+are+in+fact+for+profit%22
Then you can copy that into -your- Web browser’s address bar and see the same thing that I was looking at (usually).

If I were to rate the corruptive tactics performed by big pharmaceutical companies during my intimate experience with them , the frequent and intentional strategy of implementing fabricated and unreliable results of clinical trials performed by others possibly tops the list.

A list of corruptive tactics by the pharmaceutical industry that sponsors such trials. By this atrophy of the scientific method absent of authenticity that has been known to occur, harm and damage is possibly done to the health of the public.

Most would agree that the science of research should be sound and as aseptic as possible- completely free of deliberate and reckless interference.

However, it appears, money and increased profits can be a catalyst for disregard for human health with the clinical trial process that is largely unregulated.

This is particularly a factor on post-marketing studies of various pharmaceutical companies, as some pharmaceutical corporations seem to be deliberately conducting nothing less than seeding trials- with about a 50 percent tax credit for these trial sponsors.

Trials that are in fact pointless and void of scientific benefit.

Decades ago, clinical trials were conducted at academic settings that focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the completely objective discoveries of drugs and devices to benefit mankind.

Then, in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act, Public Law 96-517,was created, which allowed for such places with their researchers to profit off of their discoveries that were performed for pharmaceutical companies and others in the past.

Furthermore, such academic institutions were coerced to license patented inventions to those pharmaceutical companies that will then commercialize these discoveries paid for in large part by the taxpayers who funded this research to a degree.

This resulted in the creation of for-profit research trial sites without any academic affiliation that are called Contract Research Organizations.

CROS utilize primarily community patient care clinics whose staff are absent of any research training compared with the former researchers that existed decades ago. They are regulated, so they say, by institutional review boards, or IRBs. Both are for profit and essentially cater to the sponsor of the clinical trial in which all are involved with manipulating.

Because of this structure, the clinical trial investigators of these pharmaceutical sponsored trials are likely novice compared with academic researchers.

This, of course, happens with intent by the sponsor who can and does control all aspects of the clinical trial protocol at the site locations of a clinical trial that the pharmaceutical company structures and even gives the trial the title they want for their marketing purposes.

These quite numerous CROS are in fact for- profit, with some CROs making billions of dollars a year, and this market continues to grow.

The trials conducted at such places again are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies that control and manipulate all aspects of the trial being conducted involving their particular drug chosen to be studied.

Etiology for their deception regarding this manipulation is because the pharmaceutical company that sponsors such a trial is basically creating a marketing tool for this drug of theirs to be studied in this manner.

This coercion is done by various methods of deception in subtle and tacit methods.

As a result, research in this protocol of the sponsor ensures favorable results of the sponsor’s medication that is involved in the clinical trial they clearly own.

These activities are again believed to be absent of true or applied regulation to any degree, and therefore have the autonomy to create whatever they want to benefit the pharmaceutical sponsor.

There likely is a collusive relationship between the sites, the CRO, and the sponsor, as this whole system is planned beforehand by the pharmaceutical sponsor of their clinical trial to again be utilized to increase the market share of the drug studied that they promote.

Guest authorship has been known to be aggressively recruited by sponsors by paying a known opinion leader to sign off on the completed clinical trial.

Furthermore, the pharmaceutical sponsor recruits investigators to be used for this function of what ultimately is a fabricated clinical trial protocol.

The trial manuscript and protocol design is prepared by those employed by the drug company sponsor upon specific direction of this sponsor on how this should be prepared.

The medical program coordinator of a particular sponsored trial is an actual employee of the sponsoring drug company.

This person also may act as the publisher, manuscript version reviewer, and the clinical trial director who works with the drug company’s hired CRO editors whose objectives are to benefit the sponsor.

Typical and ultimate cost of the final manuscript of the trial to the sponsor created by the hired CRO and the recruited ghostwriters exceeds 1000 dollars per page, some have said.

Merck engages in this behavior, which shocked many, as they were always viewed as an ethical pharmaceutical company that always placed patients over profits.

Apparently, this is no longer the case. There are other well known and large pharmaceutical corporations that consider this plan of action standard operating procedures to ensure growth of their drugs.

Further disturbing is that once the creation of the trials is completed, the research paper is often composed with specific directions by the sponsor to writers known again as ghostwriters.

These people are usually not identified and acknowledged by the sponsor, and may not be trained in clinical research overall, as they are simply freelance writers.

One does not need research training or certification in order to perform this function. Rarely do clinical trial ghostwriters question their instructions about their assignment, which is clearly deceptive and undocumented by the pharmaceutical sponsor.

Also, these hired mystery writers are known to make about 100 grand a year performing this deception full time.

This activity removes accountability and authenticity of the fabricated clinical trial even further.

The corruptive act is finally completed by the sponsor hiring again a known thought leader as an author to have their name be placed on the trial, while this hired author likely had absolutely no involvement with the trial, or even reviewing the trial is not asked or required by the hired author, others have said.

To have the trial published, the sponsor has been known to pay an obscure journal, and the sponsor bribes the journal in a few ways, such as the sponsor purchasing from a selected journal thousands of reprints of their study from the journal, for example.

Again, how often this process is performed is unknown, yet frequent enough to create hundreds of such false writers mentioned earlier and progressively growing research sites to receive the support the pharmaceutical industry.

So benefits of pharmaceuticals that are studied in such a malicious way potentially can harm patients and their treatment options along with clear safety risks as a result of this process.

The purchased reprints of the fabricated clinical trial are then bought by the sponsor of the study from the medical journal they hired to publish this trial.

The reprints are eventually distributed to the sponsor’s sales force to share the content with prescribers, with the sales force completely unaware about this manipulation that has happened with such a trial that benefits the drug they promote for their employer.

As a bonus, the sponsor may agree to pay the chosen medical journal to advertise their products to be placed in this journal as well.

Such misconduct discussed so far impedes research and the scientific method with frightening ethical and harmful concerns, as stated previously.

If so, our health care treatment options with drugs that are claimed to have benefits that are absent have now become unreliable in large part due to such corruptive situations.

Not to mention the absence of objectivity that has been intentionally eliminated with trials produced in this way.

More now than ever, meds are removed from the market or are given black box warnings due to the damaging effects of drugs approved by the FDA. We as citizens need to dig deep and ask why this is happening.

Transparency and disclosure needs to happen with the pharmaceutical industry for reasons such as this as well as many others, in order to correct what we have historically relied upon for conclusive proof, which is the scientific method.

More importantly, research should be conducted in a way that the sponsor cannot in any way interfere in such ways described in this article, which would require independent clinical trial sites with no involvement from the maker of the drug studied in a clinical trial.

And clearly, regulation has to be enforced not selectively, but in a complete fashion regarding such matters.
Public awareness would be a catalyst for this to occur, after initially experiencing a state of total disbelief that such operations actually are conducted by such people, of course.

We can no longer be dependent on others for our optimal health.

Knowledge is power, and is also possibly a lifesaver.

“Ethics and Science need to shake hands.” ……. Richard Cabot

Dan Abshear

Author’s note: What has been written was based upon information and belief.

Published on: http://www.brainblogger.com

With enough prestige and goodwill, a decent journal can be started from scratch. It’s too early to say for certain, but the Journal of Topology that catmac mentioned above, founded by the board of editors of Elsevier’s defunct Topology, looks set to be of a comparably high standard. I suppose it’s an unusual situation, though – most people will think of the standard of Journal of Topology as being exactly that of Topology.

Even with that, though, if a professional society were to endorse an online peer-reviewed publication system wouldn’t that raise its starting impact factor sufficiently? Or is part of the calculation dependent on a publication’s exclusiveness, which would decrease the factor for an open-access system with no artificial limit on how much it was able to publish?

-robin

In my experience, published medical papers still go through a vast amount of editing after the review stage.

In particular, is it only in certain fields that the editors of journals and the reviewers are in any case academics, paid by the taxpayer not by the publishing company, and who do the job “for free” because they consider that that’s part of their job description? Also, in my field, the published version tends to be very close to the last version that emerged from the referee-author ping-pong game, in which no-one employed by the publishing company intervenes. Is this different in other fields?

@tomrees. The not-for-profit sector in my field tends to be published either by university departments or by societies such as the London Mathematical Society/ Société Mathématique de France, etc etc. Is there no similar body in medecine that would finance resumes for doctors-
possibly online or via a mailshot rather than in paper form?