You want it, you pay for it

March 9, 2011

The main problem with the current for-profit journal system is simply that they

are for-profit. Many of the most prestigious have become consolidated into the

hands of a single publishing group, the parent corporation of which has

financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Marcia Angell, when leaving

her position as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a final

essay outlining how the for-profit pharmaceutical industry was co-opting the

medical reearch industry, making universities and hospitals beholden to their

grants, journals and news media dependant upon their advertising budgets and

fielding more sales reps than research assistants to push teh off-label uses of

their products completely sidestepping the peer-review process as it is supposed

to work.

Indeed, there has been a growing problem of medical research being ghost-written

by those who have a direct interest in the outcome with the names attributed in

teh publication heading sometimes having nothing more to do with the study than

cashing the check they were given for the use of their name. The FDA is also a

large part of the problem, as they drifted from their misson as watchdogs under

the Clinton Administration to becoming partners with industry to fast-track

medications to the market, with the noble intention of saving lives. This has

instead lead to such debacles as granting license to Oxycontin with the research

claiming it was non-addictive, taking more than 2 decades to put a black box

warning on stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall to alert physicians and patients

of the cardiac risk, and the adoption of Prevnar in the chilhood vaccine

schedule (the first billion dollar vaccine), which has failed in ten years to

reduce the number of children being hospitalized for the targetted ear

infections but which has culled the more easily treated pathogens allowing

anti-biotic resistant strains to become the dominant.

In an essay published in the British Medical Journal, suggested

that the current system is indeed biased beyond repair, and the better

alternative is to open publish online and let peer review occur after the fact

to weed out the dross. Reviews like Cochrane have increasingly shown that the

peer review we are led to believe is happening actually isn't, and if we are to

restore integrity to the scientific/medical research community we need to remove

the inherrant greed of the for-profit world from our research review process.

Recommended Posts