CMAJ editors speak, guardedly

For the first time, the fired editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) have spoken publicly, although they declined to speak in detail about why they were dismissed. At a public lecture at McMaster University on Thursday, as reported in the Globe and Mail, Dr. John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill spoke about the level of controls publishers and editors and the editorial board should have in deciding what gets published.

Dr. Hoey said: "The owners get to pick the editor, but after that they should leave the editor alone." He spoke in favour of an open-source, online model such as the San Francisco Public Library of Science. "They have the advantage of not being dependent on advertising dollars."

Ms Todkill said: "The purpose of a general medical journal is to tackle a wide range of issues without feeling that there will be some level of censorship. Otherwise, you get self-censorship, then all is lost.

The CMAJ crisis blew up almost immediately after the Canadian Medical Association privatized its medical journal and hired Graham Morris as publisher. (But one of the issues that led to the firing of the editors was a controversial article about privacy concerns surrounding pharmacists demands for personal data in order to prescribe the so-called "morning after" pill. The CMA tried to have the article dropped or significantly amended after complaints from the pharmacists association. )

Since Dr. Hoey and Ms Todkill were fired, most of the editorial board has resigned and a group of doctors who are frequent contributors to the journal have said they will place their articles elsewhere.

UPDATE: The Right Honourable Antonio Lamer has announced a blue-ribbon panel of people to help him review the governance of the CMAJ and to provide recommendations "to further the CMAJ's continued commitment to editorial independence and maintaining excellence in reporting on the science and art of medicine."

The panel, which is to report by June 26, includes:

• Dr. John Dossetor, the current Ombudsman-Ethicist of the CMAJ
• Lise Bissonnette, President and DEO of the Quebec National Library and Archives
• Richard Van Loon, former President of Carleton University
• Dr. Charmaine Roye, an obstetrician-gynecologist and member of the CMA board
• Larry Mohr, Vice-President of CMA Holdings, which owns the CMAJ, and President and CEO of Practice Solutions (a commercial venture of the CMA)
• Dr. Haile Debas, Professor of Surgery and Executive Director, Global Health Sciences at the University of California at San Francisco

Anyone with comments to make to the panel can e-mail it at cmajpanel@governancereview.ca. of telephone them at (613) 566-0552.

"In the interim until the panel reports," the press release stated, "the relationship between the CMA, CMA Holdings and the Journal will be governed by nine editorial principles adapted largely from similar principles govering the relationship between the American Medical Association and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The fire principle states: The CMA/CMAH recognizes CMAJ as an editorially independent, peer-reviewed journal and accepts and respects the necessity of edtiorial independence of the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief assumes total responsibility for the editorial content in CMAJ."

Which makes an outsider wonder why this brouhaha blew up in the first place...