Open Access News

It has been a month since the Canadian Medical Association, which represents 62,000 doctors, decided to freshen up its esteemed journal by firing the editor-in-chief, John Hoey, and his deputy, Anne Marie Todkill. Dr. Hoey and Ms. Todkill spent a decade transforming the bimonthly Canadian Medical Association Journal into one of the world's more respected scientific publications. On Thursday, a story they supervised was nominated for the coveted Michener Award for meritorious public service. Since their departure, the CMAJ has imploded. Citing confusion within the doctors' association over editorial independence -- something Dr. Hoey and Ms. Todkill recently accused it of violating -- eight senior and intermediate editors have resigned, along with 15 of the journal's 19 editorial board members. Many Canadian scientists who have published pioneering studies in the CMAJ on such issues as SARS and other infectious disease outbreaks are starting to wonder if it's healthy for the country's only major medical-science publication to belong to an association aimed at promoting special interests, however enlightened. The time has come, many researchers say, to rethink how to disseminate Canadian medical research. Support is growing for a fully independent, not-for-profit journal, free from owners with vested interests, and not reliant on advertising income. One of the ideas researchers are discussing is modelled on a series of journals published by Public Library of Science (PLoS), a San Francisco-based non-profit publisher launched in 2000 with support from almost 34,000 scientists and start-up financing from private foundations. PloS Biology, the most successful of the six Public Library of Science journals, already boasts having achieved more than twice as much measurable impact among scientists as the CMAJ does....Although CMAJ contents are free on-line, the journal is packed with pharmaceutical advertising, and is published by a holding company headed by a business executive. Many traditional journals now require that readers pay for on-line access, a development Dr. Hoey and Ms. Todkill pledged to resist before they were forced out....Alan Bernstein, a CMAJ board member who serves as president of the Canadian Institute for Health Research -- Ottawa's $800-million medical research agency -- has consulted PLoS president Harold Varmus on ways to increase access to publicly supported Canadian research....

McGill University cancer researcher Eduardo Franco, one of PLoS Medicine's three Canadian board members,...thinks the CMAJ crisis offers a strong opportunity for the launch of a Canadian medical journal free of corporate and political entanglement. Ownership by entities with strong commercial ties to big pharma, or, as in the case of the Canadian Medical Association, with strong ties to governments, often creates a situation where editors are not free," says Dr. Franco, who was trained in Brazil, where free-access medical journals were pioneered. He praises PLoS for making scientific publication more transparent. "I'd love to see the CMAJ go that route." Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta health-law researcher who also serves on PloS Medicine's editorial board, says it makes good sense to divorce medical science from commercial publishing. "There's increasing evidence commercial issues impact on what's published," he says. "Numerous studies indicate, if you get commercial funding from any source, you're more likely to publish results favourable to that source." John Willinsky, director of the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia, says he, too, feels that events at the CMAJ suggest an alternative scientific publication may be needed in Canada. "The advantage of this model is that it can be started quickly and at low cost," says Prof. Willinsky, who resigned from the CMAJ board last week. "We don't want to rush into this, but we could definitely do it."

Comment. CMAJ is already OA, so the move to PLoS would not be a conversion. It would only change the business model from reliance on advertising to reliance on processing fees paid, on the whole, by authors' research grants. The story is important for at least two reasons. It shows that the processing fee model can enhance editorial independence, not undermine it as some TA publishers have charged in the past. And the mainstream press is covering it.