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Today's Pick: Tainted evidence
Time to burn those medical books
With three major publishing scandals and counting, 2009 is going down as a tough year for medical literature.
Let’s review:
In March, the venerable JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association was at the centre of a bizarre conflict of interest controversy, in which the journal’s editors mocked and allegedly threatened a doctor for publicizing an unreported conflict of interest in a May 2008 JAMA article. The journal has since approved a controversial new editorial policy, forbidding other whistle-blowers from sharing their suspicions with anyone outside the journal.
Then in April The Scientist reported that Merck teamed up with major health sciences publisher Elsevier to create a fake peer-reviewed journal. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine reprinted or summarized articles published in other Elsevier journals that had favorable findings for Merck drugs without disclosing that Merck itself sponsored the journal.
Now, the New York Times is reporting that ghostwriters payed by Wyeth wrote 26 articles on hormone replacement therapy for publication in multiple peer-reviewed journals between 1998-2005. Wyeth’s driving role in the articles’ creation was never disclosed – instead, experts in the field were recruited to serve as figurehead authors for the final papers.
What does this all mean for evidence based medicine? In the long run, these scandals might benefit medical research by giving a boost to the open access medicine movement. As OA advocate Gavin Baker notes, it’s kind of hard to question the credibility and legitimacy of open access models when our most highly regarded commercial publishers are failing so miserably.
For more on open access medicine, see our Medicine 2.0 series:
- Medicine 2.0: Online peer review? Facebook for physicians?
- What is Medicine 2.0?
- Why is Medicine 2.0 important?
- Medicine 2.0: Mixing up research and web 2.0
- The business of Medicine 2.0
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Kathryn Fitzgerald @ MaRS
Kathryn provides market intelligence services to MaRS Advisory Services clients and to The Innovations Group at the University of Toronto. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information.
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