What’s Happening in the Bigger World of Publishing: A “Heads-Up”

Abstract

THE BUSINESS OF PUTTING TOGETHER A JOURNAL THAT is relevant, interesting, and scholarly has become increasingly more challenging and complex. Pressure from funding agencies to make government-sponsored research results freely accessible, the increasing movement towards online access to articles, and a general need to attend to the bottom line in a shrinking market for print journals, has resulted in two troubling events that I would like to share with you. The details of the first, the severing of ties between the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) and the American Nurses Association (ANA), are outlined in the accompanying letter that was sent to ANA by members of the International Association of Nurse Editors. In the second case, the editor-in-chief and the senior deputy editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), the journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) were fired in February of this year. The reason for the firing—editorial freedom. The editors of the CMAJ commissioned a story on women’s experiences in obtaining the morning-after pill from pharmacies in Canada. When the Canadian Pharmacists Association heard about the story, they complained to the publisher of CMAJ who asked the editors to withhold the story.1 The editors chose to publish a negotiated revision but were fired for irreconcilable differences.2