The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine sounds legit doesn’t it? Of course it does. But it’s a total and complete sham intended to simultaneously:
- Make money (lots of it) for the publishers
- Provide an “authoritative” voice for big pharma that it completely and covertly controlled that was trussed up to look like any other authentic peer-reviewed medical journal
Merck, the pharmaceutical giant developed the periodical that looked like a real live peer-reviewed medical journal. Within its pages, Merck published “data” that exhibited the company’s products in a favorable light. The pharmaceutical giant then paid Elsevier, the largest corporate publisher of medical journals, to publish the thing. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine has no editor, doesn’t appear in MEDLINE, nor has a website, but who’s counting.
The story was first broken by Milanda Rout writing for The Australian, and Bob Grant at The Scientist has the most substantial coverage. “Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship,” wrote Grant in his lede.
The story first came to light during the lawsuit of an Australian who claimed the Merck anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx caused his heart attack.
The drug industry has previously paid for supplements to existing journals and have published research compilations “that tend to lack scientific rigor (so-called ‘throwaways’) (.pdf; 808Kb),” according to Peter Lurie, deputy director of the public health research group at the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen. But this is the first time big pharma has gone to the trouble of actually knocking off a fake medical journal. And multiple issues at that.
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