Merck and Schering made a mistake in thier protocol. Typically, a big pharma company hires others to design thier clinical trials to illustrate efficacy and safety. Studies are conducted at sites called contract research organizations, where the big pharma company has complete control on how the study progresses and the conclusions that will be illustrated. They then hire what is called a ghostwriter to annotate this fictitious data on a particular drug. Finally, the big pharma company hires a notable author to sign off on this fabricated study. The last step is for the big pharma company to go to a journal selected by them to convince them to publish this work of fiction, which is thier constucted clinical trial. How do they convince them? They promise to order tens of thousands of copies of thier study from this journal to distribute to thier reps. This order is a great source of revenue for a journal, combined with pharma advertisements within the journal, which compose about half of the entire journal.