A company based abroad is acquiring the publishing of Canada’s best medical journals. Here’s the catch: this company is accused of publishing “junk science journals.”
An investigative collaboration between CTV News and Toronto Star discovered this intriguing news.
People from the medical research community are alarmed about the company, OMICS Group Inc., while concerned about the reputation of the Canadian journals.
OMICS Group Inc. is a corporation based in Indiathat claims to offer medical and scientific journals that were reviewed by highly respected reviewers and scientific organizations. The group acquired Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group, two medical publishing companies in Canada.
These two companies cover Plastic Surgery, Pathology, Optometry and General Internal Medicine. Since the OMICS purchase, the pathology, optometry and general internal medicine journals all signed with different publishers.
Last August, the United States Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against the company. The statements from FTC included: “…deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars” as well as falsely claiming their journals undergo strict peer-review practices and have editorial boards that are comprised of highly esteemed academics.
The OMICS Group is under the open-access model which means the articles are readily available for online readers. There are other open-access publications that were proven to have a strict compliance policy for the peer review process. In light of this, OMICS has attracted a lot of attention regarding the controversy.
Rose Simpson, the former managing editor of the Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine, said that after the deal was announced, she did a little research on her own. She browsed the OMICS website and caught noticeable errors.
“There were all kinds of typos, the grammar was wrong.” She added, “In medical journals, everything has to be accurate — every comma, every word — so that was my first suspicion.”
She said she was informed that all work would be transferred to India. She was hired by OMICS but then decided to stop because she found out that the company was being sued by FTC. She immediately started warning medical practitioners as well as medical groups about this.
She added, “This is a foreign company that has a questionable reputation that has bought up Canadian companies and is using their names as a front for whatever activities they are doing, which are not necessarily above board.”
Simpson has worked with a lot of doctors and researchers. She said that they exert true effort in their work and they do it tirelessly just to conduct and analyze their studies. “If they deal with a company that is not reputable then their manuscript becomes not reputable and they have wasted their time with their research,” she said.
Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said last August.: “The defendants in this case used false promises to convince researchers to submit articles presenting work that may have taken months or years to complete, and then held that work hostage over undisclosed publication fees ranging into the thousands of dollars.”
OMICS International CEO and managing director, Srinubabu Gedela said that all allegations against his company are false. “We are getting huge support from the scientific community for our open-access journal.”
He continued, “All the allegations we are getting are from Western countries…and from a few publishers as well as their agents.”
“We are disrupting their business by making scientific information open access and we are fighting for that.” Gedela said his company has support from 50,000 editorial board members.
However, there was one Canadian researcher enlisted as a member of the editorial board who confirmed that he has not participated in any journal review activities for OMICS.
As an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Brain Research Centre, William Jia was invited to be an editor but never received any work from OMICS. He states that if there is an issue concerning the journal review process at OMICS, then he would like to have his name removed from the editorial board.
Robert Kalina, the former publisher of Pulsus Group, claimed that the name “Pulsus” was sold and not the corporation. The Canadian medical journals were not sold to the OMICS Group as well. The medical organizations in charge of the editorial content still own those journals.
Dr. Stephen Hwang said, “As soon as we were alerted to the fact that (OMICS) had purchased these two publishing companies, we moved immediately to sever our connection with them and terminate our contract.” Dr. Hwang is the president of the Canadian Society of Internal Medicine, the same group that owns the Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine,
Dr. Madhukar Pai, a professor at Montreal’s McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health told CTV News,“This is a huge scam that is going on in the publishing world.”
Dr. Pai said he is alarmed about such companies acquiring Canadian publications. He added, “It really pisses me off that this can even be happening in Canada.”
The story is not yet finished – everyone’s still in play. Scientists in Canada are struggling to come up with a solution and some are trying to find new and trust-worthy publishers.
The post Offshore Company OMICS Accused Of Publishing Junk Science appeared first on NUTRITION CLUB CANADA.
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