After the initial production of the special issue, though apparently before all the papers promised were produced, Copernicus pulled the plug on the journal. Here is their statement in full:

Termination of the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics

Copernicus Publications started publishing the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics (PRP) in March 2013. The journal idea was brought to Copernicus’ attention and was taken rather critically in the beginning, since the designated Editors-in-Chief were mentioned in the context of the debates of climate skeptics. However, the initiators asserted that the aim of the journal was to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines rather than to focus on climate-research-related topics.

Recently, a special issue was compiled entitled “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”. Besides papers dealing with the observed patterns in the heliosphere, the special issue editors ultimately submitted their conclusions in which they “doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project” (Pattern Recogn. Phys., 1, 205–206, 2013).

Copernicus Publications published the work and other special issue papers to provide the spectrum of the related papers to the scientists for their individual judgment. Following best practice in scholarly publishing, published articles cannot be removed afterwards.

In addition, the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing and not in accordance with our publication ethics we expect to be followed by the editors.

Therefore, we at Copernicus Publications wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of the journal as well as the malpractice regarding the review process, and decided on 17 January 2014 to cease the publication of PRP. Of course, scientific dispute is controversial and should allow contradictory opinions which can then be discussed within the scientific community. However, the recent developments including the expressed implications (see above) have led us to this drastic decision.

Interested scientists can reach the online library at: www.pattern-recogn-phys.net

Martin Rasmussen
January 2014

So, let me rephrase. A group of climate science denialists made up a story about what they wanted to do and convinced a publisher to let them create a “peer reviewed journal.” The publisher was rightfully suspicious, but just as rightfully, open to the idea. We can’t, after all, be repressing the development, publication, and dissemination of science just because we don’t like some feature or another of the people involved.

This, of course, is where “pattern recognition” (which is indeed a thing in science, though mainly for exploratory purposes) can go wrong. This is where the famous phrase “correlation does not imply causation” (which I’ve discussed here) comes in. It would not be hard to find a pattern in celestial reality to match the basic Hockey Stick curve. If we then add to that pattern some wiggles that relate, say, to insolation (the amount of energy coming in from the sun, which varies over time) and a major climate driver like ENSO (the El Nino thing) to make the “pattern” more climate-looking, we’ve got a nice match. The reason this is not hard is because celestial bodies move in a diverse range of periods and there are enough celestial bodies that we can produce many different combinations of their movements, and then pick the one that matches our data. This is roughly similar to using a quasi-random number generator to produce thousands of lines on a graph, then picking the line that matches our data, except that the final analysis using celestial bodies can say “We’ve found a pattern matching orbital geometries of the solar system that explains climate change” instead of “We made up a line from random numbers and it matches climate change.”

This method is even seen as inappropriate among the hard core climate science denialists. Science Denialist Anthony Watts, while making sure to decry the suppression of his fellow denialists by the scientific mainstream, admits that the bogus analysis is bogus:

I will say that some of the papers in that special journal edition really aren’t any better than curve fitting exercises. …

As many WUWT readers know, while years ago I expressed some interest in planetary tidal force effects on climate, I have long since been convinced that there’s zero planetary effect on climate for two reasons: 1) The gravitational effects at distance are simply too small to exert the forces neccessary, and 2) The methodology employed often results in hindcast curve fitting a theory to data, where the maxim “correlation is not causation” should have been considered before publishing the paper.

The denialosphere is, naturally, reacting strongly to this event.

Jo Nova, noting that the “Streisand Effect” may ultimately help the bogus papers achieve more attention than they otherwise might (and I certainly hope this is true … examples of really bad papers are very useful sometimes), calls for a general boycott of any journal that does not speak out against Copernicus’ closing of Pattern Recognition: “it’s time to boycott any journal which does not speak up against this weak act of caving in to the dominant paradigm. It is not about whether they agree with the scientific conclusions, it’s about free speech. It’s about science.”

TallBloke, one of the editors of the special issue, was already busy using the journal to raise funds for his own accounts, apparently, when he had to interrupt himself to become indignant. On December 13th he posted an update on the special issue and told readers, “If you would like copy of the print edition, please use the donate button on this site (top left of the sidebar) to remit 18.50 Euros plus 4 Euros to cover the cost of the journal copy and postage/packing. I will then pass these orders on to Copernicus. Thanks for all your support and consideration.” Read that twice. Yeah, I’m not sure either. Anyway, after the axing, he notes, “A conclusion and its implication in the summary paper was: because our scientific investigation leads us to the prediction that the Sun is headed into a protracted minimum, the warming forecast by the IPCC might not happen. This has led to the journal being axed by the parent Publishing house Copernicus. The papers are still available … Please download and disseminate them widely.” Tallbloke also gives us, usefully, the text of the letter sent to the coordinating editors Nils Axel Mörner and chief editor Sid Ali Ouadfeul:

Dear Sid-Ali, dear Nils-Axel, We regret to inform you that we decided to terminate the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics (PRP).

While processing the press release for the special issue “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”, we read through the general conclusions paper published on 16 Dec 2013. We were alarmed by the authors’ second implication stating “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”. Before the journal was launched, we had a long discussion regarding its topics. The aim of the journal was to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines. PRP was never meant to be a platform for climate sceptics. In addition to our doubts about the scientific content of PRP, we also received information about potential misconduct during the review process. Copernicus Publications cannot risk losing its excellent reputation in the scientific community. We therefore wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of PRP and decided today to cease the publication. This decision must come as a surprise for you, but under the given circumstances we were forced to react.

We hope that you understand our reasons for this decision. We thank you very much for your cooperation and wish you all the best for your future career.

Best regards, Martin and Xenia
Copernicus.org

Luboš Motl repeats the falsehood that the journal was terminated because of one sentence by writing “One sentence in Scafetta’s paper on solar/climate patterns was too much for the AGW loons and their cowardly slaves and collaborationists,” and concludes his blog post by stating, in reference to mainstream science, “They have poisoned the Academia way too much; they have depleted their right to live,” followed by a rather ham-handed attempt to link climate scientists to the Nazi Gold Dawn party in Greece.

(I can tell you from personal experience that we are not all linked; Golden Dawn took the trouble a year ago or so to declare that I am the Anit Christ. And they produced a lot of evidence to support their claim!)

Ugo Bardi had this to say about “Pattern Recognition” (the journal and the thing you do):

…they say that it was closed, among other things, because of “the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis”

That, however, is just a part of the story and most of it had to do with the denialist stance of the editors on the matter of climate. But the problem with this journal was even deeper. What is exactly to be intended as “pattern recognition in physics”? … It is, at best, the “curve fitting” approach to physics which may be a lot of fun, but if it is not based on a good physical model is just normally an exercise in irrelevance.

So, the very concept of a physics journal dedicated to pattern recognition, alone, is very doubtful, to say the least. Then, it is no wonder that a (so-called) physics purely based on pattern recognition in physics results arrives in the denial of the physical basis of climate change.

Remember this moment, folks. I don’t think you are going to see Ugo Bardi and Anthony Watts agreeing on something too often!

Big City Lib had already recognized the nefarious nature of this journal. Of the names of some of those involves, BCL writes:

People that read this blog may be familiar with some of these names. They are climate change denialists of one stripe or another. Tattersall is a blogger who writes under the name of Tallbloke. W. Soon = Willie Wei-Hock Soon. N. Scaffeta = Nick Scaffeta. Nils-Axel Mörner is a crazed wingnut who is also a goddamn water witch! JE Solheim thinks that a simple harmonic model (movements of the sun, moon and planets together with linear trends) provides a better fit to the global temperature data since 1850 and likely a better predictor than the assembly of 44 climate models used by the IPCC….

So what appears to have happened is that a small group of denialists paid money to Copernicus Publishing, launched their own journal under its imprint, and published crap. Now they can say its all passed “peer review”. It will be interesting to see exactly what this means under the circumstances. That they read one another’s stuff?

That was written before the Journal’s termination and the assertion by Copernicus that the peer review process was conducted with “malpractice.” So, to answer BCL’s question: Yes, they appear to read one another’s stuff! Good call!

Retraction Watch and Science are discussing this as well.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) today announced the membership agreement with BioMed Central and SpringerOpen. Publication costs for research articles published by researchers funded by NWO for articles published no later than 2008, who chose to publish via BioMed Central will now automatically be covered (up to the maximum as defined by the NWO Incentive Fund Open Access Publications)

Bev Acreman BioMed Central’s Commercial Director said, “We are delighted that the NWO has taken this significant step to broaden Open Access activity in the Netherlands and look forward to working closely with them to maximise the open access research published by Dutch authors.”

Under the terms of the arrangement, NWO, will centrally cover all of the article processing charge (APC) for Dutch researchers who wish to publish via BioMed Central in any BioMed Central, Chemistry Central or SpringerOpen peer-reviewed open access journal.

This is in line with NWO’s ‘Open Access Incentive Fund’, designed to encourage its researchers to publish open access articles and books as well as conference sessions and journals. The new agreement is an important step for the Dutch research community in making its research widely visible and to help the NWO to use its open access fund as efficiently as possible.

That’s from a press release from BioMed Central

PLoS (Public Library of Science) is expanding PLoS Currents with the launch of two new sections, one on Huntington disease produced with support from CHDI Foundation, Inc., and the other entitled Evidence on Genomic Tests in collaboration with CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Another section called the Tree of Life (focusing on new phylogenetic analyses) is coming soon.

PLoS Currents was launched in August 2009 … as “a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.” More than 60 articles have been published in PLoS Currents: Influenza with many articles posted at the height of concerns about the H1N1 pandemic.

The essential goals of PLoS Currents are to minimize the delay between the generation of data and the publication of new research findings, by providing a publication venue where contributions are reviewed rapidly by experts, can be cited so that authors gain the necessary recognition for their work, and are publicly archived so that interested researchers can effectively build on the work of others. By accelerating the sharing of new findings in this way, PLoS Currents has the potential to accelerate the research cycle itself.

To achieve these goals, there are two key features that make PLoS Currents different, and much faster, than a conventional journal. First, each section of PLoS Currents is run by a Board of Reviewers – a group of expert researchers led by the Editors of the section. This group reviews all submissions and determines as rapidly as possible if the conception, structure, and presentation of the submission indicate that it is a legitimate work of science and does not contain any obvious methodological, ethical, or legal violations. As long as the work passes this test, it is published. Many contributions are published without significant revision, and experts outside of the Board of Reviewers are only rarely consulted during the review process.

The second key difference from conventional journals is that the submissions to PLoS Currents are written and published using a web-based tool, called Google knol. Authors are in complete control over the content and appearance of their submission, and once it has passed the review process, articles are published immediately…

The Editors for the new section of PLoS Currents on Huntington Disease are Gill Bates (King’s College London, UK [not closely related to Bill Gates — ed]), Mike Levine (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) and Sarah Tabrizi (University College London, UK). The Editors for the new section focusing on Evidence on Genomic Tests are W. David Dotson and Muin J. Khoury – from the Office of Public Health Genomics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA. Both sets of Editors are supported by outstanding teams of expert researchers who review the new submissions.

Gill Bates indicated that she has taken on a leadership role in the Huntington disease section because “there is an urgent need to facilitate the publication of a wide range of datasets that currently never see the light of day. The concept of PLoS Currents: Huntington disease has received a great deal of enthusiasm from the HD research community.” Simon Noble (Director, Scientific Communications, CHDI Foundation) said “The rapid publication of data at PLoS Currents: Huntington Disease that otherwise might not be published in traditional journals will, we hope, accelerate the exchange of scientific data and ideas, enabling investigators to plan research programs with more relevant information at hand. CHDI Foundation is delighted to support this publishing platform, which we think will be particularly important as Huntington disease research gets ever closer to the clinic.”

The CDC also see tremendous potential in the PLoS Currents approach for evaluating genomic tests. Muin Khoury said “we need a strong evidentiary foundation for the integration of genomics into clinical and public health practice. The new PLoS Currents will fill a much needed niche in authorative synthesis of emerging information on genomic tests”.

There is now an effort to have the Saba Bank designated as an internationally recognized sensitive area, but one thing standing it the way of this effort is a lack of scientific knowledge of the region.

Open Access Publishing to the rescue!

PLoS ONE Launches the Biodiversity of Saba Bank Collection

Researchers from Conservation International and its partners have completed a collection of rapid assessment biodiversity surveys of the Saba Bank. The Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection, which publishes in PLoS ONE on May 21st, represents the first ever peer-reviewed open access cross-taxonomy collection of Conservation International’s Marine Rapid Assessment Program (RAP).

…

The rapid assessment biodiversity research included in the PLoS ONE Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection provides critical information on the highly diverse benthic communities and reef fish that inhabit the Saba Bank. The results of Conservation International’s innovative Marine Rapid Assessment Program (Marine RAP) included several species potentially new to science that were collected from one of the largest coral reefs in the Caribbean.

The collection includes six research articles written by collaborators from Conservation International’s Science and Knowledge Division, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Department of Environment & Nature of the Netherlands Antilles, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and University of Alabama among others.

The release of the PLOS ONE Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection comes on the eve of The International Day for Biological Diversity (IDB) on May 22, proclaimed by the United Nations to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.

source: PLOS press release.

More information here

I hold no truck for the publishers, and there are plenty of things I like about Amazon. But this latest dispute is clearly evidence that something I blogged about in April but that many of my dear readers thought absurd is in fact coming to pass. ( I was right about Amazon.com, just like I’ll be proven right about the super bowl!!! You’ll see soon enough!!!)

So, to set things straight, I’ll repost the original, with minor revisions:

It is a ground breaking company, it is a bookstore that is mega mega like few other companies are. It is a bookstore that is a huge corporation. Think about that for a second. Think about bookstores in the old days then think about this thing, Amazon Dot Com. A bookstore that is leading the way in mega cloud computing. It has one of the most effective ways ever of interfacing with its customers. It has become the go to place for many people for the purchase of almost anything one can imagine being delivered by mail. Amazon Dot Com is a thing the likes of which we have not seen before.

An increasingly small percentage of what they sell is books. An increasingly small percentage of what people buy off the Amazon.com site is sold by Amazon.com. Amazon dot com is not a bookstore. Google them. Read up a bit. Yes, they sell books and your local bank will open a savings account for you too, but that is a small part of what they do. If everyone stopped buying books at amazon it would not shut them down, and if they did shut down you might be quite surprised as to what else shuts down.

You all know about the #AmazonFail maneno¹. I suspect that most of what you know is slightly incorrect. I have read three or four blog posts about it, and not long ago I listened to a current NPR report. They neither jibe nor jive. I suspect as more details come out this will be a two part story: A serious socio-political screwup followed by a “glitch” of very significant proportions. I could be wrong about that, but we shall see.

(Here is a very insightful commentary on the situation giving details and links.)

What is important here is this: Whatever rules you were thinking may apply to the conduct of a large corporation and how they must interface with the rest of society do not apply here. Amazon is not a private corporation that can do whatever it wants. It is actually a utility, a public good, part of our economic commons. It is like Google in this respect.

I know, I know, Amazon and Google are private corporations yada yada yada. You can think that if you want, but you’d be ignoring the important reality that all of our public goods and utilities, including the police, the fire companies, the energy suppliers, even the road building agencies of city, county, state and federal governments (in the US) have transited between private and public and sometimes back (or to some combination). What our society needs to get it’s pin-headed collective brain around is the nature of this thing, this Amazon and Google (and whatever) thing. And to recognize that it is very real and not just a dot com that will go away when everyone realizes they don’t need it or the loans come due. Which will bring us, ultimately, to the question of OpenAccess and OpenSource. And who owns The Internet. And a few other issues.

¹ = big problem.

Well, we can’t do much about that now, but I thought you’d like a summary of the sessions I managed to attend. This is a totally biased and random set of thoughts not a uniform overview of the sessions I attended. I should mention that NOT attending several of the sessions was very painful because I wanted to go to them but it is hard to be in more than one place at the same time. Most of the sessions will be on line as videos and I’ll let you know what I know about that when I know it.

From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing – Tom Levenson, Brian Switek and Rebecca Skloot (program link)

This session was crowded and hot and I was sleepy and hungover. So the fact that it was also an excellent session (for me) says much about the participants. The most interesting and useful information that came out of this session related to strategies for using a blog to develop and eventually promote a book. So, dear readers, keep this in mind. In case I write a book or something.

Science on Radio, TV and video – Darlene Cavalier and Kirsten ‘Dr.Kiki’ Sanford (program link)

This session began an ongoing two-day thought process on how science communication should work. Well, actually, the thought process started the night before when I found myself almost totally alone (because others were distracted or just looking away) with Chris Mooney, and we had a long talk about this issue prompted by my recent review of Unscientific America.

I guess the conversation appeared to be very animated because there were reports the next day that Chis and I had a big fight. But we didn’t. We had a respectful and productive conversation. We may, however go ahead and have a big fight here. We’ll see!

(Here’s my comment on that post which seems to be temporarily stuck in moderation:

Good to see you at the conference.

I have very mixed feelings about the idea of “certifying” blogs. However, there are two reasons to do so: 1) it will help in our efforts to develop the right message and to control the results of people’s internet “reserch” and 2) it is a form of self-policing that one could argue we are not doing enough of.

This does not obviate the potential problems it creates, and it may well be that those problems outweigh the benefits. I simply don’t know much.

While I agree that bloggers should be promoting the excellent institutional structures you mention, it simply is true that a certain number, and it is a growing number, of people do pay attention to blogs. Some of this number may be people who are somewhat distrustful of the mainstream institutions.

)

In any event, the session served as a touchstone to the current state and potential effectiveness of multimedia and other promotion of good science.

Citizen Science – Darlene Cavalier, Scott Baker and Ben MacNeill (program link)

I hope you get to see a web site or video related to this session. The point was quite simple: To bring us up to speed on citizen science projects, and a web site organized by Darlene to serve as a clearing house for this. One of the key issues that was brought up (by me, in this case) is the problem that will eventually emerge when non-real science projects show up and want to play with the real science projects. What do you do when the Anti Vaxers want to do a citizen science project? Or the creationists?

An Open History of Science – John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson (program link)

John McKay gave a great overview of the history of science publication to recent times, and Eric Michael Johnson gave an overview of more recent times and of OpenAccess publication.

We then discussed the evils of publishers and proprietary publication, the current status of some important legislation to stop OpenAccess publication, and the role of alternative models.

Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford (program link)

This was the session I was in. The session went rather well, with lots of discussion and numerous excellent ideas. I’m going to wait to point to the filmed version of it before going into details, but I’ll just mention now that one debate that is already arising from this is the following: How do we change the fact that when someone googles a few key terms to conduct their own scientific research … regarding something important in their own lives … they often end up with several pages of woo and garbage? How do we deal with the fact the fact that when something like a web blog award is organized, pseudo science sites have an equal or better chance of winning a “science blog award” as real sites? Can there be something like a “UL approved” feature for science blogs? Can this be done fairly and inclusively? As we speak, the blogosphere is diving itself up into the “No, we can’t do that it would ruin it for everyone” camp and the “We might not like this idea but it is going to have to happen” camp.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media – David Kroll and Damond Nollan (program link)

This session started out with David Kroll and Damond Nollan giving an overview of social networking and other online media mainly at one traditionally black university, followed by an interesting discussion.

In a former life, I was asked to look into developing social media for a college advising program, so I have a special interest in this topic. One of the questions I have always felt to be very important is how do college or university representatives (faculty, advisors, admins) deal with the fact that if we encourage, develop, and facilitate social media we are going to encounter things like college students having conversations about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll right before our very eyes. So, I was interested to find both here and in later conversations with Nollan that the admins at at least one college were willing to live with what they created. This is rare.

I was also interested to hear an example from David wherein he observed something (on twitter) that should not really have been there (not in the student’s interest) and how he intervened. (I was disappointed that when I asked David about it, a member of the audience felt moved to answer on David’s behalf and shut down the conversation …. I really wanted to know why David followed the tact he chose, what his thought process was and what he considered, because it matters a lot to relationship building with students and has interesting legal implications, but alas, we must discuss that some other time.)

Getting the Science Right: The importance of fact checking mainstream science publications — an underappreciated and essential art — and the role scientists can and should (but often don’t) play in it. – Rebecca Skloot, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and David Dobbs (program link)

I expected this to be a good session, but it turned out to be a great session. I did not learn anything new about fact checking and how to do it and what it is, but the discussion covered much more than that and provided a set of real life examples that make the process more tangible. (As an aside, I’m afraid there is at least one attendant to the meeting that might think that I blog things that may or may not be “facts” then wait to see what happens in the comment section, but sometimes people don’t really listen at these discussions …)

All three authors had great examples and great advice. I wish we had another hour to talk. It would have been interesting to compare academic writing with writing-writing in relation to fact checking. (I had an interesting conversation later on with Henry Gee about that.)

That’s all for the session. There were also many wonderful hallway conversations. Finally, a statistic for you: Number of times a sentence started with “Don’t blog this but….” = 14.

Palmer’s Oak normally occurs at much higher elevations, in cooler, wetter climates. In contrast, the Jurupa Oak scrapes by in dry chaparral, wedged between granite boulders and stunted by high winds, atop a small hill in plain sight of suburban backyards.

You never know what you are going to find in your backyard in the suburbs of California.

The age of the tree was estimated by an analysis of the rings by Michael May.

Ring counts show that the Jurupa Oak is growing extremely slowly. At its current rate of about 1/20th of an inch per year, it would have taken at least 13,000 years for the clone to reach its current size. And it could be much older.

There are actually several pockets of this species of tree located outside the plant’s main distribution, and reproduction by cloning seems to be the modus operands for their long term survival.

The researchers believe that

…this stand of Q. palmeri is a relict of an ancient population that has persisted in the Jurupa Mountains despite warming since the last glacial period. … ancient clones have been identified in other woody taxa , including a nearly 12,000 year old clone of creosote (Larrea tridentata Coville) found in the Mojave Desert. Nonetheless, our 13,000 year estimate for the age of the Jurupa clone places it among the oldest of living plants.

… Our findings at Jurupa suggest that cloning may be a significant contributor to the persistence of these disjunct populations. Numerous other woody shrubs in the southwest share such disjunct distributions and patterns of growth, and it is thus tempting to speculate that disjunct populations of many of these other species may consist of extremely long-lived clones as well.

Some day the Ice Age will be back, and perhaps these lower elevation pockets of self-cloning plants will contribute to the inevitable shift in the distribution of vegetation. Should they survive global warming, that is.

The paper that reports these findings is published in PLoS ONE, an OpenAccess science journal. This means that you can read the original paper even though you are not a subscriber. That is how OpenAccess works.

May, M., Provance, M., Sanders, A., Ellstrand, N., & Ross-Ibarra, J. (2009). A Pleistocene Clone of Palmer’s Oak Persisting in Southern California PLoS ONE, 4 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008346

Hat Tip: Who Else!?!!???

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

NYT – caution, page contains obnoxious advertising

PLoS Medicine, an Open Access scientific journal, sued for the release of documents related to ghostwriting and on July 24th of htis year, US. District Judge william Wilson, Jr. granted a motion for discovery [PDF: Case 4:03-cv-01507-WRW Document 2120].

Now, PLoS Medicine has created a web page that allows access to this archive of Ghostwriting related information.

It is apropos that this happens at this time. Ghostwriting is the more genteel and less shouty, but in many ways more insidious, side of a kind f large scale “astroturfing” by the medical industry. We see bough-off “Libertarians,” LaRouchites, Republicans, and other conservatives being bussed around to scream at Democratic congressmen at Town Hall meetings in the US, and with Ghostwriting we see products promoted through what is supposed to be an independent and trustworthy channel: the scientific peer reviewed literature. Both are dishonest practices designed to line the pockets of investors, CEO’s and everyone in between in the medical industry. In the first instance, this is done by ensuring that real competition (facilitated by a public option for health care) does not happen, and in the latter, by competing in the marketplace of lies.

Enjoy. Or, be disgusted. As it were. Everything can be accessed here.

Thank you PLoS for doing this cool thing.