Report: “Canadian Medical Journals Hijacked for Junk Science”

Note: For background on the lawsuit discussed in the story below, see: FTC Issues Complaint, Charges Academic Journal Publisher OMICS Group Deceived Researchers (August 27, 2016)
From The Star (Toronto)

Two of Canada’s most prestigious publishing houses for medical journals have been quietly bought up by an international publisher that is being sued by the U.S. government to stop it from printing what amounts to junk science for profit, a CTV News/Toronto Star investigation has learned.
The takeovers have sent shock waves through the medical research community and put more than a dozen journals at risk of being delisted on PubMed, the gold standard for trustworthy, peer-reviewed scholarship.
Even worse, doctors worry that Canada’s good name could be hijacked to lend credibility to bogus research papers, riddled with typos and inaccuracies, that have proliferated on the Internet in the age of “open access” academic literature.

Of the 16 Canadian journals affected by the takeover, six — including the Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine and The Canadian Journal of Optometry — have terminated their publishing contracts with OMICS or stated their intention to do so. The 10 others did not respond to Star emails.

Filed under: Journal Articles, News, Publishing