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Incident raises questions of editors' and publishers' corporate connections

Written byAlison McCook
| 3 min read

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If you don't like getting your paper rejected before it even reaches peer review, ask David Egilman how to get around it: In what may be an unprecedented move, when the Brown University researcher's paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal.

Two years ago, Egilman submitted an editorial to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) that critiqued a 2003 Dow-funded paper in Texas Medicine that said 11 cases of mesothelioma among Dow workers exposed to asbestos did not "suggest an occupational etiology"—even though mesothelioma typically strikes only 1 to 2 people per million, Egilman said.

He received an E-mail with comments from editor Paul Brandt-Rauf, who said the material was "not likely to be a high priority for the majority of JOEM readers."

Egilman told The Scientist he believed ...

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