BMJ Commission on the Future of Academic Medicine must challenge medical publishers to deliver value

The BMJ Commission on the Future of Academic Medicine is welcome for all the reasons articulated by Abbasi.1 The remit of the commission should include tackling the poor value taxpayers, the public, and academics receive from publishers.Publishers rely on huge subventions from the public through journal subscriptions and article processing charges paid for by academic institutions and funders. Meanwhile, they also receive payment in kind from publicly funded researchers who write, peer review, and edit their content, almost always free.This extraordinary business model, in which content is both supplied by and paid for through the public purse, has allowed publishers to become obscenely profitable,2 while also shirking responsibility to adopt measures to tackle publication biases that distort the scientific record.3 The integrity of science is at best a second order concern. This is particularly true for legacy titles, where remaining profitable simply requires maintaining their brand—often achieved by privileging novel…
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