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Publisher pulls book because of factual inaccuracies. Where were the editors?

A math journal published by Elsevier published over 300 research articles written by the Editor-in-Chief. The articles appear to have bypassed the peer-review process entirely.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, logged over 17,000 free views in a day on upstart "social publisher" Scribd would be the story. The real story, however, lurks in the comments left on the Scribd web site.

As more journals shift from being run by university presses and scholarly societies to corporate entities, the goal is better management, better sales (since packages of journals are frequently sold together) and economies of scale. The fear of some involved in journal publishing is that corporate interests will limit the role of scholars in making key decisions.