A Fistful Of Dollars: Why Corporate Publishers Have No Place In Scholarly Communication

"With roughly four billion US$ in profit every year, the corporate scholarly publishing industry is a lucrative business. One of the largest of these publishers is Anglo-Dutch Elsevier, part of Reed Elsevier. According to their website, their mission is to 'publish trusted, leading-edge Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) information – pushing the frontiers and fueling a continuous cycle of exploration, discovery and application.' However, Elsevier recently admitted to publishing a set of six fake journals, aimed to promote medical products and drugs by the company Merck, but with the appearance of peer-reviewed, scholarly literature. Clearly, trust is not Elsevier's top priority. What is Elsevier's top priority, though, is making money...."