Over the last week, I’ve spent some time covering the sale of Canadian medical journal publishers Pulsus Group and Andrew John Publishing to OMICS International, a publisher in Hyderabad, India, that has engaged in many “predatory” journal practices (see blog posts passim ad nauseum).

But is there anything more to this story than just a decision that has left 16 Canadian journals scrambling to find a new publisher? OK, it’s rough for the journals involved, but a tempest in a teapot in the big scheme of things.

I think there is. This is just one signpost — one really bad stretch of washboard — on the road to the grave for the society journal.

Richard Smith, former editor of BMJ, was accused of hyperbole when he announced the death throes of national medical journals in his blog back in March. He was talking about the recent firing of the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal in particular, but commented that journals are disappearing in any case, and that in trying to find solutions for their journals medical associations are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

In work I have done for society journals in the last six years that I’ve been consulting, I have said, “These are tough times for journals.” To keep journals afloat, societies have had to re-evaluate the journal’s role, cut its costs, and increasingly give it to another established publisher to publish.

There are several reasons for this. First, journals have become more complex and expensive to run, as there usually needs to be a print version and an online version (the death of print being exaggerated). Modern digital publishing is not in a society’s core competency. Furthermore, it is much more expensive for a society to develop all of the publishing expertise in order to run a journal or two than for a big publisher just to add a journal to its publishing mill (and let me tell you, some of them are a real mill churning out thousands of articles).

The traditional forms of revenue — subscriptions from academic libraries, ads from drug companies, member dues — are all down. Journals find funds increasingly from their society’s coffers, creating bad feelings as the society’s Board of Directors inevitably questions why the society is publishing a journal but then grudgingly  agrees to keep it going.

Even for the publishers, there’s no money in it any more. Andrew John and Pulsus Group were respected small commercial publishers that did a good job for their journals. But they couldn’t find buyers — who wants a bunch of very niche Canadian medical titles ? One of the societies I talked to said it was too bad that their journal would have to be published outside of Canada, as more and more Canadian journals are. But the large Canadian publishers can’t take on journals unless they are a sure bet or the society agrees to pay the costs under a contract publishing arrangement.

Into this morass stepped two x factors: the fact that Canadian publishers agreed to sell to a questionable publisher and that predatory publishers have started buying legitimate journals in order to buy credibility. The general reaction to these developments was, whoa, where did that come from? But this out-of-the-blue story came about because of the slow, creeping quicksand that journals are in.

So how long will these small society journals be able to continue? I suspect that we may lose a few as a result of the OMICS situation. Others will find a home with a legitimate foreign publisher. Many will move to own their title and copyright or add a “right of first refusal” to their publishing contracts to prevent being eaten by a predator.

But in the coming years more and more titles will disappear. Only a radical rethink of traditional society journals can save them, and I haven’t seen anything suggested that is radical enough. This is immensely sad. It’s an industry that I’ve spent most of my career in. We cannot put our heads in the sand, though. We have to look forward to Richard Smith’s “post-journal world” and see what joys it holds.