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Remember the revelation that pharma giant Merck had paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that promoted its products? Turns out Elsevier has an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals for money:
Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."More Fake Journals From Elsevier
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If you are on facebook, you can become a "fan" of PLoS.org -- the Public Library of Science
(which, IMO everyone who cares about open-access science should be a fan of) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Library_of_Science
From there you can follow all the fall-out from stuff like this. It is pretty ridiculous that this faux-publishing can even happen and I doubt that it would if science publishing were more open and available for review.
Aren't there laws against this sort of misrepresentational FRAUD... like, ANYWHERE?
Glad you are talking about this. I sent you guys a link about this about five months ago - granted it was about a much more abstract subject area (mathematics), but Elsevier has no class (or production values) whatsoever.
See this link:
http://www.arsmathematica.net/archives/2008/11/11/elseviers-chaos-solitons-and-fractals/
OMG, you boingboing'd /.? That seems like a first.
Even without the fake journals, Elsevier is a lump of concentrated evil in the academic publishing sphere. Here's a link to supplement Cupcake Faerie's @3:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2008/11/elsevier-beyond-the-pale-of-scientific-respectability.ars
They've been pulling this stuff since I was an academic, way back in the early 1980s (the Time Bandits allusion is an 'ommage to those days . . . ).
While we're talking about the evils of Elsevier, how about their (still ongoing) lawsuit against Carnegie Mellon for having the temerity to employ people putting out Zotero, a great piece of open source software that happens to compete with an Elsevier product?
Really, in the scheme of things, printing a few brochures formatted to look like papers seems quite minor.
I'm quitely removing all Elsevier journals from my publication list...
How much did my university library have to pay renew Elsevier subscriptions? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
PubMed Central (PMC) is also free access to full-text articles.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pmc
It's the online division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Enjoy.
I'll be submitting an article soon and thought I'd check out the journal. It's published by Wiley-Blackwell, so not Elsevier.
"Aren't there laws against this sort of misrepresentational FRAUD... like, ANYWHERE?"
...Are you kidding? Think about it, kids: The Onion can only have so many people writing parodies on their payroll. Someone has to pick up the slack hiring people to write faux reports and news items!
@Anon (#9): PubMed, while an excellent source for abstracts and the like, does not (AFAIK) publish articles - it is just a database.
But PLoS (mentioned by Secret Life of Plants) as well as BioMed Central are both leading the charge in fully open access scientific publishing.
(And as such are far more desirable outlets for both publishing and finding articles than Elsevier and its ilk.)
Given that nobody is doing anything in the high places, I guess the last resort we have is to try to boycott as much as possible Elsevier journals and be very vocal about why we are doing it (and hope a substantial number of scientists joins us.
I am not in a good position for boycotting, I have a publication coming up, but I am not the main author, and I am very junior in my lab. Another 3-4 should come out of my thesis this year or next and I can ask my boss to submit them to PLOS or somewhere else.
So, what can we do to boycott Elsevier? Or at least to make more noise about this crap. Suggestions, anybody?
Dross1260: How much did my university library have to pay renew Elsevier subscriptions? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Three answers:
1. It depends on the size of your institution, and whether they're in a consortium with other institutions.
2. You don't want to know. Even quarterly Arts journals, which are comparatively cheap, can run into the hundreds of dollars a year.
3. Contractually, the library probably can't tell you anyway.
In terms of what anyone can do about this? Best bet is to make sure the librarians who are managing all the contracts and subcriptions and negotiations with vendors know about this. Just don't be obnoxious about it--they're busy people wearing an insane number of hats.
Keep this in mind, too: many of Elsevier's production costs have been going down over the last few years as typesetting and proofreading are done in the Philippines and India. They're literally paying less than half of what they paid for those services 18 years ago. But hey scientists and librarians, I'm sure they've been cutting their subscription rates for you, right? *crickets*
This is a totally despicable and really anti-scientific practice. As a professional scientist, this sort of thing makes me quite afraid. The usurping of legitimate, peer-reviewed publication models in favor of naked money grabs by publishers will end up destroying the credibility of science. Thanks, Elsevier.
How much did my university library have to pay renew Elsevier subscriptions? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Um, if you are a fan of unbiased scientific inquiry you might want to lay off the Ben Stein quotes...
I used to work for a small-time Berkeley company competing in the academic press market. Elsevier was a word that we were more careful about than f***.
Librarians routinely referred to them as The Big Evil One. No other company has done as much to guzzle library budgets, give publishers a bad name, and generally destroy the variety in academic journals.
I hate them.
P.S.
Wily-Blackwell is quite respectable!
Boycotting. There's not a lot that most people can do, but if you are in the scientific community, there are three things.
One: stop referencing their journals. Not referencing them reduces their impact score, which is basically the journal's rating. This will not be easy, but it is possible. Elsevier publishes Cell, the Actas, Lancet, the Current Opinion journals, and many other standbys. High impact is a tough island to assault, but every little bit can help. There's a list here.
Any of you computer whizes think you can make a Firefox plugin that will flag journals from that list in Pubmed or will filter an RSS feed? (I get my Pubmed searches automated via RSS). Or better yet, something that works in Endnote? And before you say it, latex is what my gloves are made of. I've tried the citation manager before and hated it.
Two: Publish elsewhere. Even if it means a lower impact journal. I am just about done with a paper that I was planning to submit to one of their journals. I'm going to put it on hold and look elsewhere now. I've been hankering to use PLoS, I'm sure they have one up my alley.
Three is obvious (the other two should be, too, but this one even more so). Tell others to do the same. I'm going to ATS in San Diego next week, and I plan to read up all I can on these cases and talk to my colleagues about this.
(By the way, anybody else going to be there?)
@Anonymous #6
Elsevier is not suing Carnegie Mellon. Zotero is developed by George Mason University & they are being sued by Thomson Reuters.
Here's another avenue of action:
Harvard University Arts and Sciences has adopted a policy of open access publishing for its faculty: http://chronicle.com/news/article/3943/harvard-faculty-adopts-open-access-requirement
So has Stanford: http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/faculty/dspace.html
And MIT: http://www.bitsbook.com/2009/03/mit-adopts-an-open-access-policy/
University of Colorado School of Medicine is also expected to adopt this policy soon: https://www.cu.edu/sgrecord/
(no permanent link available, must search for "open access school of medicine")
You can also do this at your institutions.
While browsing the net, I found two more fake journals in Computer Science:
(1) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS) (http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/contact-ijcsis)
(2) International Journal of Computer and Network Security (IJCNS) (http://www.ijcns.org/)
While browsing the net, I found two more fake journals in Computer Science:
(1) Computer Science Journals
http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/home.php
(2) International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI) (http://www.ijcsi.org/)
(3)http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/2009/05/dear-president-of-ieee.html
Petre Dini
May be your paper is not accepted and you said fake for IJCNS because this journal is free publish paper.
Reviewer Member
http://www.ijcns.org