Dr Richard Smith, former Editor of the British Medical Journal, was invited to give a presentation, by MedComms Networking in Oxford on Wednesday 10th February, on the future of medical publishing. His presentation raised the issue of what the problems are with the traditional process, and what the future for the industry is.

The trouble with medical journals, as Dr Smith sees it, are that there are too many, they don't meet information needs, are not relevant, do not add value, are too expensive, too biased, too slow, too pro-establishment and they are to concerned with authors rather than readers, to name a few. Smith suggested that the drivers of a new form of publishing include money, a vision of something better, balkanisation of the literature and slowness.

"There's a huge disparity between what the publishers put into the publishing process and what the researcher community does. Some could say that the researchers receive very little value for the effort put into the process. They do the editing, often unpaid, do the peer-reviewing, often unpaid, buy the journals at inflated prices and then do the reading. The publishers manage the process, lend money to the process and market the journal and sell reprints, which is the hugely profitable stage of the process. A very uneven relationship" Dr Smith suggested.

The fragmentation of the information was also raised as a significant problem. Information relevant to the reader is all over the place, and gathering it together can be a time consuming and expensive process.

The time of submission to publication was also highlighted as a major problem of the current publishing system, with the process sometimes taking up to one year.

Dr Smith agreed that there are problems with the current methods of communicating science, and that change is needed but there are barriers. These include natural conservatism, the academic credit given to where people publish, impact factors and vested interest in that scientific publishing is very profitable. For changes to happen, these barriers need to be broken down.

So, the questions are how will the changes happen and what is the future?

The future of scientific publishing, as Dr Smith sees it, will be online and open-access and, for the most part, paperless. He sees papers being published on the web in databases as being a key element in the change. For those paper journals that remain, they will present the information in a more easy to read and use format, with realtime citation information, reader scoring and the dropping of the current impact factor system.

Dr Smith concluded his presentation with a stark warning to the publishing community; "The barrier to change of academic credit depending on where you publish will not last. The traditional world of publishing is on the way out."