Can Medical Journals Wean Themselves off Drug Advertising?
Publishing is expensive, and medical journals obviously need a business model to be sustainable [27]. Advertisements are only a part of the financial relationship between pharmaceutical companies and most medical journals. Pharmaceutical companies are the primary purchaser of reprints, and may buy thousands of reprints if they are advantageous to the drugs that they manufacture. Additionally, drug companies “sponsor” subscriptions [28] provided without cost to targeted populations (referred to as “controlled” subscriptions). The recently deceased BMJ USA (a derivative publication of the weekly BMJ, containing selected articles, more advertisements than the weekly BMJ, and some US-specific content) was almost 100% controlled, with all but 25 of 95,000 subscriptions apparently sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. Most subscriptions were sent to high prescribers [29]. The Lancet tells potential purchasers of sponsored subscriptions that “three quarters of all respondents [recipients of
Publishing is expensive, and medical journals obviously need a business model to be sustainable [27]. Advertisements are only a part of the financial relationship between pharmaceutical companies and most medical journals. Pharmaceutical companies are the primary purchaser of reprints, and may buy thousands of reprints if they are advantageous to the drugs that they manufacture. Additionally, drug companies “sponsor” subscriptions [28] provided without cost to targeted populations (referred to as “controlled” subscriptions). The recently deceased BMJ USA (a derivative publication of the weekly BMJ, containing selected articles, more advertisements than the weekly BMJ, and some US-specific content) was almost 100% controlled, with all but 25 of 95,000 subscriptions apparently sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. Most subscriptions were sent to high prescribers [29]. The Lancet tells potential purchasers of sponsored subscriptions that “three quarters of all respondents [recipients of
