Elsevier, one of the major academic publishers, has admitted that it published six fake medical journals in the period of 2000-2005. These medical journals were paid for by pharmaceutical companies, who also supplied the content and additional, more blatant advertising for their products.

The reason this is such a big deal is that many academic libraries have outsourced some, most, or all of their collection development to publishers, buying packages and putting standing orders in place that let the publishers decide what will be included. The belief was that publishers would not risk their reputation by providing anything less the adequate quality control over the materials being selected.

Clearly, someone at Elsevier left that the library's supervision of the materials being provided by Elsevier was so lax that they could risk slipping in a few fake journals without anyone noticing. (Aside: I guess they also felt that the medical researchers accessing these journals would not be able to tell that they were fake, which is also troubling.) Elsevier has owned up to the mistake, and has fired the people involved.

Still, this should be a warning to libraries. Publishers like Elsevier are for-profit corporations. They adhere to the goals and ethics of librarianship in order to sell their product, but ultimately, their one goal is to make money, to turn a profit. Providing users with access to authoritative, reliable, and authentic information resources is the goal of the library, and ultimately it falls to the library to ensure that this goal has been met. For that to happen, libraries need to take collection development seriously and be wary of outsourcing this work to third-party, for-profit organizations.

See also: Google's book digitization initiative.