A quick glance at the last page of the most recent issue of the Medical Journal of Australia reveals there is as yet no replacement editor-in-chief and two of its most senior medical editors, Tatiana Janusic and Ruth Armstrong, are missing in action, as is the editorial advisory committee. There is an interim editor.
Many of the assistant editors have gone as well, replaced — in the Australian Medical Association president’s memorable words — because all they did was move words around on the page. This they had been doing, together with checking facts, assertions, arithmetic, grammar, syntax, clarity and originality of submitted papers, and keeping the faith in the MJA community for 20 years.
This activity was now to be done by anonymous staff often employed overseas by publishing giant Elsevier.
How this role for Elsevier allows it to claim copyright if all they are doing is moving words around on the page, as you will find it does in the fine print at the bottom of the back page of the MJA describing the editorial staff, I do not know. If you publish in the MJA now, copyright over your paper is held in part by Elsevier.
The large publishing companies that have scooped up and repackaged knowledge and science are like giant fishing trawlers. I leave it to you to contemplate the similarities.
When I took on the job as editor-in-chief a little over two years ago I did so understanding the risks because the Australasian Medical Publishing Company (a fully owned subsidiary of the AMA) has a grim reputation as an employer and because the AMA and I are not natural bedfellows. Those risks did not extend to working with or for Elsevier.
Few academics know the details of what the big publishers have been up to for the past 20 years and many scholars have vested interests in not rocking the boat because they need to publish to progress.
I am 73 and at a point in my career where these things no longer matter. What matters is what happens to a 101-year-old journal that, despite ups and downs and complex dealings with advertisers and its owner, has been a good custodian of professional values, committed to the publication of research and policy.
What happens when it becomes part of the Elsevier stable?
A quotation to outsource production of the MJA was obtained from three companies, of which Elsevier was one, and presented to the AMPCo board in November last year after I had left the meeting and without my knowledge. The bid had been prepared with no consultation with me.
In April, without discussion of alternatives with me, I was summoned to meet the AMPCo board chairman, who issued me with a letter of termination.
I was then accompanied to my office by the HR manager to identify my goods that were to be packed and sent to me.
AMPCo’s second sacking of an editor-in-chief in the past four years — there have been several before us as well — proceeded with surgical precision and the guillotine blade did not squeak through disuse as it fell.
Like my predecessor, I was committed to the future of the MJA and all the editorial staff, not just the medical editors. These people were my professional colleagues who participated in planning substantial changes to the journal following reader consultation. We were doing well. But the bottom line is: what lessons can be drawn from this?
First, corporate values rule in publishing at present. The effects of the commodification of knowledge, where a publisher asks to be paid to publish your paper, keeps the copyright, limits access to the paper and charges libraries a king’s ransom for bundled subscriptions, is scandalous.
Universities, pressed to conform to bureaucratic and managerialist principles to maintain their funding base, judge their academics’ performance by publication citations and indices of unproven validity about research productivity, provided by publishers.
Second, academics have let this happen under their noses and I do not believe the indifference to what has been happening in libraries and journals has been ethical or impressive. Specialty journals have profited from aligning with big publishers, similar to the snouts-in-the-trough behaviour involved in accepting sponsorship for conferences and travel from the pharmaceutical industry. We academics and universities are far from blameless.
Third, information technology is transforming the collection, collation and dissemination of knowledge. This offers hope. Knowledge has been commodified in recent decades but this will not last. The big publishers had best make their bucks during the remaining fat years because the lean years are coming when new forms of information dissemination will displace them.
Stephen Leeder is an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Sydney and former editor-in-chief of the MJA. He will speak on the ethics of academic publishing today at the State Library of NSW.