David Spurgeon

Several members of the editorial board of CMAJ, the journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), were set to resign on Tuesday, as the BMJ went to press, claiming that the association has not been open about its firings of the journal’s editor and deputy editor, John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill. Philip Devereaux, an assistant professor of medicine at McMaster University and a member of the board, announced the development after the editorial board met on Monday evening.

Earlier, relations between the editorial board and the journal’s publishers, the association and CMA Holdings, appeared to be moving toward an agreement that would have ensured the journal’s editorial independence. After the board rejected a governance plan offered by the association on 7 March, saying that the association was merely trying to retain its ability to meddle with editorial content, Larry Ehrlich resigned as chair of the journal oversight committee. That was seen as a positive move by the editorial committee, because Dr Ehrlich was felt to be compromised by the fact that he was also on the association’s board of governors.

The editorial board saw the first four points in the governance plan proposed by the association as positive and conveyed this to the association, but it believed the next six points could be improved. Since then, the CMA has changed some of its governance plan in what the editorial board sees as the right direction, and it planned to meet on 13 March, as the BMJ went to press, to discuss these changes.

At the same time that it proposed the governance plan, the CMA appointed Antonio Lamer, the retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, as head of a panel that would study the CMAJ’s governance structure. It also named Noni MacDonald, a Halifax pediatrician who has served on the journal oversight committee, as interim editor of the journal. Dr MacDonald is a former dean of medicine at Dalhousie University and founding editor of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s journal, Paediatrics and Child Health. Bruce Squires, a retired former editor of the journal, was named editor emeritus. Dr Squires is a founder of the World Association of Medical Editors.

The CMA has posted its interim governance principles for the journal on its website (www.cma.ca). The president of the association, Ruth Collins-Nakai, told the BMJ, "Our board unanimously supported the editorial independence of the journal at its meeting at the end of February. And we’re hoping that by having this governance review panel look at the governance structure that we have in place [and that will] make recommendations to strengthen it, it will provide not only solace to the people who have been working extremely hard to keep the journal going, but to reassure the academic and medical community . . . that is exactly what we expect in the future."

In a statement on the website on 8 March, Dr Collins-Nakai said, "We’ve been as transparent as we possibly can be given the legal constraints we face. But I do think the substantive steps we have taken with these appointments send an important message to everyone that the CMA is committed to producing an excellent editorially independent peer reviewed journal."