[zmb_]

I am not sure I understand the outrage. We are, I assume, talking about peer reviewed research papers here? Regardless of who has funded the research and for what motives, the work has passed the community's filter for quality, significance and correctness. You might raise questions about the effectiveness of that filter, but that is a separate issue.

In fact, it much worse to dismiss research just because of who funded it or what their assumed motives were -- which is a strong human instinct, and which seems to be implicitly behind this outrage.

[mhermher]

It's pretty standard to include your funding sources in your publications, and some see it as morally imperative. That it was not included is suspicious. But yes, it's an additional safeguard on that filter. And I think you give the whole system a little more credit than it deserves. At the end of the day, the publishers need to make money and they need papers to publish. Don't just assume that just because something is published in a peer reviewed journal that it meets the highest standards of quality. It's very often not the case.