The web delivered a bit of a serendipitous dialectic today on the subject of how medical journals pay the bills. This morning, the New York Times published a story about the launch of OncologySTAT, Reed Elsevier’s new ad-supported portal for cancer research. The publisher’s plan basically goes like this:
1. Aggregate cancer research
2. Get doctors to register to use the site by providing free access
3. Tell pharmaceutical advertisers about all the doctors gathered in one place
4. Profit
NYT reports that Elsevier’s medical journals are making money, but revenue is flat. The company hopes this new model will generate higher profits and provide a workable strategy in the future as everything heads online.
If that’s the thesis, here’s the antithesis (of sorts). This afternoon Slate published a piece by Kent Sepkowitz that criticizes medical journals for… their cozy relationship with pharmaceutical advertisers. Sepkowitz argues that if journal authors must submit to conflict of interest disclosure, so too should journals. His solution? Each journal issue should include stats about current advertisers and how much coin they’ve dropped for display ads, special sections and reprints.
So, is there a synthesis to be found here?
-Greg Dahlmann