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Medical Journals Have a Fake News Problem

With help from drug companies, Omics International is making millions as it roils the scientific community with sketchy publications.
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Gedela, Omics’s founder, in his office in Hyderabad, India.

Photographer: Mahesh Shantaram for Bloomberg Businessweek

Srinubabu Gedela was 24 in 2006 and studying for his doctorate at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, on the east coast of India, when he faced firsthand what he’d later view as a scourge plaguing scientists in the developing world. Since the 17th century, medical journals have been the portal through which researchers gain insight into the latest discoveries and best practices from colleagues continents away. But subscriptions to the top publications can cost thousands of dollars a year. As Gedela tells it, he was trying to break new ground on diabetes, and Andhra’s research library was woefully understocked. Gedela comes from Allena, a village of roughly 2,000 people. He was raised there in a mud-walled, sugar-cane-roofed shack by farming parents. How were budding scientists like him supposed to advance, he wondered, without the tools afforded to their more privileged counterparts in the West?

To solve his immediate problem, Gedela paid 250 rupees (about $4) each month for an overnight bus to visit research institutions in Hyderabad, about 400 miles away. The beat-up vehicles lacked air conditioning and bathrooms and jostled over cracked roads baking in 95F heat. More than 12 hours later, Gedela would arrive and pore over the latest issues of publications such as Talanta: The International Journal of Pure and Applied Analytical Chemistry.