by Cheryl Rofer
Elsevier, a for-profit company that publishes scientific journals, has a bit of egg on its face. It turns out that it collected reprints of articles about Vioxx and Fosamax that it had published in the past and published them together in what is reported to have looked like a scientific journal. This activity was done for Merck, the big drug company that produces those same Vioxx and Fosamax. And the conclusions of all those articles were positive for those drugs. Merck paid for the publication, which was titled “The Australian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.”
Apparently no such journal exists. The purpose of this compilation presumably was for distribution to doctors to encourage them to prescribe Merck drugs. Elsevier, it also turns out, has done such things before and now says it regrets the practice and they’re not doing it any more.
There’s been a problem for a long time with for-profit publishers of journals. They’ve got a pretty cushy business model, as described by a commenter at Crooked Timber:
Content acquired for LESS than free in some fields (i.e. page charges), all editorial and reviewing services provided by volunteers - no costs at all but physical printing and distribution (an obsolete technology for quite a while now), and yet they get scholars to pressure libraries into paying humongous subscription fees which must surely generate obscene profits given how limited their expenses are.Those “humongous subscription fees” amount to tens of thousands of dollars, a hardship for many academic libraries.
Tempting as Elsevier is as a target, I’m wondering if the problem here isn’t more our model for making information about prescription drugs available. Here in the United States, we have incessant advertising for hitherto unmentionable physical problems on television. Doctors get free trips to vacation spots for giving speeches about the virtues of various drugs to other doctors, not to mention monetary reward, which can look just a bit like bribery or at least conflict of interest.
We take the drug companies’ word that research into new and better drugs costs all the money they charge us (or our insurers) for those prescriptions, although they’re lagging on vaccines and drug-resistant TB while they look for incremental changes they can tout as improvements in remedies for anxiety, shyness and other maladies that they define. And while they spend as much or more on advertising those drugs, of which the Elsevier project had to be a very small part.
It’s time to take a look at the cost-effectiveness of all this. That could be a part of Barack Obama’s health plan. It can’t come too soon.