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Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Is the Medical Publishing Industry a Scam?

Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Education, Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.81.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Is the medical publishing industry a scam?  As the open access model has grown, pay-to-publish has helped large publishers maintain profit margins similar to that of large tech companies.  The problem?  They do so by exploiting the blood, sweat, and tears of academics and the institutions that support them.   Join Dr. Patrick Georgoff (@georgoff, Duke Surgery), Dr. Ayman Ali (BTK education fellow, Duke Surgery), and special guest Dr. Allan Detsky for an engaging discussion. 

Paper discussed: The Changing Medical Publishing Industry: Economics, Expansion, and Equity (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-023-08307-z)

DR. ALLAN S. DETSKY, MD, PhD, FRCPC, CM is Professor, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, and Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto; former Physician-in-Chief, Mount Sinai Hospital(1997-2009); and former Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine at The Toronto Hospital and University of Toronto (1987-1997). Dr. Detsky received his B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and his Ph.D. (in Economics) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978.  He has served on the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine, and as a member of the Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee for the Province of Ontario where he spearheaded the effort to formally include cost-effectiveness considerations into the Canadian drug reimbursement process. Dr. Detsky has received 2 Tony nominations as a producer (Jesus Christ Superstar 2012, Come From Away 2017 and an Olivier Award for Best Musical in 2018. In June 2018, he was appointed by the Governor General to the Order of Canada.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Behind the surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day. But top journals in science can now charge more than $10,000 for an article processing fee because the market will bear it.

0:37.7

First of all, the open access coupled with article processing charges, APCs, brings up an equity issue.

0:45.0

That's called being a perfectly discriminating monopolist.

0:49.0

You charge the high fees to people who can afford them.

0:55.4

Welcome back to Behind the Knife.

0:56.9

This is Patrick Georgeoff, trauma surgeon

0:58.7

at Duke University, and I'm joined by co-host Dr.

1:01.8

Ayman Ali, who is a Duke General Surgery

1:04.4

resident and Surreal Education fellow here at Behind the Knife.

1:07.6

And today, we're going to discuss a topic that impacts all of us,

1:11.1

and that is the medical publishing industry. Now who better to

1:15.2

set the stage than a great medical parity artist Dr. Glaucombe Fecken?

1:19.4

Hey man, how's it going? Oh, great. I just had a paper published.

1:23.4

Dude, congrats, that's awesome. It was in a pretty prestigious journal too.

1:27.2

Oh, wow. They probably pay you pretty well for that. Yeah. Wait, what? The journal, they published your paper, they must have paid you pretty well for it, right?

1:38.0

Oh, well, no, the journal doesn't pay you any money.

1:42.0

Yeah, but they're using your paper. Yeah, so. Well, like if you spent years writing a book, you sell the book, you get money for it? Oh well I do get paid to do the research, you know, I get grant

1:57.0

funding. Oh, so the journal that publishes your paper, they give you grant money to actually do the research.

2:03.4

No, the grant money comes from the government.

2:09.0

So the journal doesn't pay for the research or the content that they're publishing.

2:13.7

Are there some kind of non-profit?

2:15.5

Oh no, the largest academic publishing companies make like 20 billion dollars a year.

...

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