Richard Smith is a former editor of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group. He is well-known for provocative editorials. Here is an excerpt from one, published recently in The Scientist:"Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, has seen broadly stable revenues (€2,236 million in 2006, €2,370 million in 2010) but growing profits (€683 million in 2006, €847 million in 2010).
Scientific journals remain very profitable. Few industries manage a profit margin of 35.7% (that for Elsevier in 2010), but then few industries are given their raw material—in this case, scientific studies—not only for free, but also in a form that needs minimal processing."
It is nice to see that the current and a former editor of the two most famous British medical journals, The Lancet and BMJ, are now on Twitter:
Why has the Cochrane Collaboration never quite taken off in the US?
— richard horton (@richardhorton1) April 5, 2012
Any symptom in an elderly person should be considered to be a drug side effect until proved otherwise. Jerry Avern
— Richard Smith (@Richard56) April 2, 2012
References:
Reading Into the Future | The Scientist, 2012.
The scientific journal throuh the centuries - a little bit of history from Health Librarian (HL) Wiki http://buff.ly/WZqP2S
