tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post8175306349497987644..comments2024-03-28T13:39:27.601-07:00Comments on DSHR's Blog: Gresham's LawDavid.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-70025350979635603632017-08-30T11:51:22.617-07:002017-08-30T11:51:22.617-07:00OMICS International gets a long and searching exam...OMICS International gets a long and searching examination from Bloomberg's Esmé E Deprez and Caroline Chen in <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-29/medical-journals-have-a-fake-news-problem" rel="nofollow"><i>Medical Journals Have a Fake News Problem</i></a>. They point in particular to the use Big Pharma makes of this channel for propagating advertising. For example:<br /><br />'A Pfizer paper on the financial burden of chronic lower-back pain published in 2014 in Omics’s Journal of Pain & Relief suggests the pharmaceutical company may have had an interest in skipping the traditional journals’ review processes. Based on a survey of just 106 people it concluded that direct and indirect costs of severe back pain ranged from $11,800 to $25,051 per patient annually. Such figures could be used to justify a medication’s price to patients and their health plans. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, will rarely publish cost studies, because they’re notoriously unreliable. “It’s very easy to just drive the results to a conclusion that you want,” says John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, biomedical data science, and statistics at Stanford. The Pfizer paper was “not very transparent, so it’s hard to see if their calculations are accurate.” 'David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-57814850580572399392017-07-23T14:43:45.775-07:002017-07-23T14:43:45.775-07:00Another day, another set of predatory journals fal...Another day, another set of <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/07/22/predatory-journals-star-wars-sting/" rel="nofollow">predatory journals falling for a simple sting</a>, this time with a <i>Star Wars</i> theme.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-34673728523322236122017-04-30T08:13:12.717-07:002017-04-30T08:13:12.717-07:00At Pacific Standard, Paul D. Thacker's Inside ...At <i>Pacific Standard</i>, Paul D. Thacker's <a href="https://psmag.com/inside-the-academic-journal-that-corporations-love-a1dbe48cca1c" rel="nofollow"><i>Inside the Academic Journal That Corporations Love</i></a> reports that:<br /><br />"But the term “rigorous” is hardly an accurate description for the journal. Indeed, a glance into the journal’s history offers a telling window into the industry of creating and packaging junk science with the appearance of academic rigor.<br /><br />“<i>Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology</i> is a vanity journal that publishes mercenary science created by polluters and producers of toxic chemicals to manufacture uncertainty about the science underlying public-health and environmental protections.” says David Michaels, professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University School of Public Health."<br /><br />The journal is published by Elsevier. It is the journal of the <a href="http://www.isrtp.org/" rel="nofollow">International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology</a>. Among the signs that ISRTP is less than objective is:<br /><br />"the society held its June 1999 council meeting in the Washington, D.C., office of Keller and Heckman, the chief law firm for the chemical industry. ... Keller and Heckman also bills itself as the premier law firm for the tobacco and e-vapor industries. The minutes from the June meeting note a member of Keller and Heckman attending along with representatives of several chemical industry trade associations. Minutes from February 2002 also record the meeting taking place in Keller and Heckman’s D.C. office and state that future meetings will also be held at the law firm."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-39211084557093268902017-03-22T21:09:19.726-07:002017-03-22T21:09:19.726-07:00Another month, another successful sting against pr...Another month, another successful sting against predatory publishers. A <i>Nature</i> comment reports that Polish researchers managed to get <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/543481a" rel="nofollow">Anna O. Szust</a> (oszust is Polish for "fraud") appointed to the editorial boards of 48 journals, including 4 as editor-in-chief:<br /><br />"Although journals that accepted our fraud were informed that Szust “kindly withdraws her application”, her name still appears on the editorial boards listed by at least 11 journals' websites. In fact, she is listed as an editor of at least one journal to which we did not apply. She is also listed as management staff, a member of conference organizing committees, and ironically, a member of the Advisory Board of the Journals Open Access Indexing Agency whose mission it is to “increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals”."<br /><br />Gina Kolata's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/science/open-access-journals.html" rel="nofollow"><i>New York Times</i> story</a> has quotes from Jeffery Beall.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.com