Elsevier Journal Scandal Provokes Significant Librarian Response

Elsevier admits total of six problematic publications; Progressive Librarians Guild issues call for action

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 5/14/2009

• Six "journals" with improperly disclosed sponsorship published between 2000 and 2005
• Libraries did not collect the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine
• Progressive Librarians Guild calls for action from ALA, MLA

Since word of Elsevier's publication of a "fake" journal sponsored by pharmaceutical company Merck spread last week, the company acknowledged the publication of five more journals with similar undisclosed sponsorship between 2000 and 2005. (This publication and Elsevier have the same parent company, Reed Elsevier.)
 
Merck's financial backing of the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine (AJBM) through Elsevier's Excerpta Medica subsidiary came to light during testimony of a class-action lawsuit against the drug company, but fewer details of the other five titles are known. "Elsevier declined to provide the names of the sponsors of these titles," according to an article in The Scientist.

Elsevier statement
In a statement issued on Monday, CEO of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division Michael Hansen said that the company's Australian office had undertaken "an unacceptable practice," and expressed regret that the sponsoring companies' backing of the publications were not properly disclosed. He continued:

We are currently conducting an internal review but believe this was an isolated practice from a past period in time. It does not reflect the way we operate today. The individuals involved in the project have long since left the company. I have affirmed our business practices as they relate to what defines a journal and the proper use of disclosure language with our employees to ensure this does not happen again.

Librarian response
Though it appears that the sponsored publication was not sold or licensed to libraries as part of standard subscription packages, the scandal is nonetheless galvanizing librarians across the academic community. Framing the controversy in terms of librarians' role as facilitators of genuine and credible information, Jonathan Rochkind, Digital Services and Software Engineer at Johns Hopkins University's Sheridan Libraries, asks:

What responsibility do librarians have to detect such things on behalf of our patrons? Is it feasible to expect us to be able to do that, or is the increasingly giant body of mostly electronically read literature way out of our ability to be expected to ever catch anything like this? And if even professional experts in publishing conventions can’t reasonably be expected to catch it… what does this say about scholarly output in general?

Call to action
Taking the most aggressive and organized action far, the Progressive Librarians Guild issued on May 12 a call for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity. 

The guild "asserts that the matter of AJBM was not just an accidental editorial error on the part of Elsevier. It was a money-making business using the reputation of Elsevier to leverage deceptive pharmaceutical industry marketing of a harmful product."

The strongly worded statement outlines the guild's desired response from a number of librarian professional organizations:

The American Library Association, specifically the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), must demand that Elsevier be transparent about its editorial policies and practices that corrupt the research process and the information environment. ALA and other library organizations, such as the Medical Library Association, must insist that Elsevier and its divisions reveal all covert corporate involvements in sponsored pseudo-scholarship, especially the role of MECCs (medical education and communication companies).

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