Recently, the pharmaceutical giant, Merck, was caught having paid scientific publishing giant, Elsevier, to create a completely bogus “peer-reviewed” journal to help promote positive data about Merck’s products. The details are covered in this article from Bioethics.net.

In my mind, this is a clear argument for open access scientific journals. While it would be possible to corrupt the process of peer review in an open access journal, it would be pretty difficult to hide the fact for very long.