New paperless journal springs from the fallout at the Canadian Medical Association

After last year's ruckus at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, with the editorial team and most of the board resigning, one of the outcomes was expected to be a new journal that the dissenters felt would better serve the medical community. That journal has now been launched. It's called Open Medicine.

The fomer editorial team who resigned -- John Hoey, the editor, and Ann Marie Todkill, the senior editor -- are on the editorial board. The publisher is John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia and the co-editors are Stephen Choi from the University of Ottawa and Anita Palepu of UBC.

The journal is wholly online (i.e. no print edition) and "open access", meaning that the contents will be open to the scholarly community without payment. The journal is seeking sponsorships, which will be acknowledged on the site. Sponsors cannot attach strings to their support and have to sign a pledge not to attempt to influence or interfere with editorial decisions -- one of the key reasons why the above-mentioned dispute took place. (Of course, without the hullaballoo, Open Medicine might not have been launched.)

James Maskalyk, MD, Assistant Professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, an associate editor (currently posted in Abyei, Sudan, with Médecins San Frontières) introduces the new journal with an article called "Why Open Medicine?". It says, in part...

To an important degree, the impetus to launch Open Medicine arose from widespread dismay in the Canadian and international medical community over one such attempt to suppress open discussion and restrict the scope of health care discourse. Further, too much of the revenue that sustains medical journals comes from pharmaceutical advertising that attempts to influence physicians into making decisions based on brand recognition rather than on discerning scholarship.

Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people's lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago. Paper and postage are simply too expensive. The landscape is different today. An ideal medical journal — a truly open one — is not only within our sight, it is within our reach.

Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It will be paperless and available without charge or any other barrier to access online. We will publish peer-reviewed science and analysis as well as clinical articles. We will provide a forum for informed and inclusive debates on medicine and its application. Open Medicine will be independent of any commercial publisher or association ownership — it will be "owned" by all who read and contribute to it — and will take no advertisements from companies selling pharmaceuticals or medical devices. We will rely on voluntarism, donations and ethical advertising. Any revenue will be used to improve our ability to meet the needs of our readers and contributors.

See story from CBC website.