Changes to CMA programs and services including wind down of CMAJ Open: CCCTG Statement

The Canadian Medical Association recently announced the planned wind down of CMAJ Open (see: https://www.cma.ca/news/focusing-impact-upcoming-changes-cma-programs-and-services).

Open access journals play an increasingly important role in providing a venue for dialogue and scholarship in research, quality improvement and education relevant to Canadian and international healthcare systems. Canada has played an outsized role in every one of these areas and is looked to by our peers across the world for clinically relevant scholarship. Having a relevant, general medical open access Canadian venue for peer review and dissemination is critically important for learning health care systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it glaringly clear that we need open access venues for the Canadian medical community to provide expert and data-driven solutions for the challenges we face. This work, published in an open access format, allows access to people outside of medical professions.  It is not just critical for Canada, but also instrumental for most of the world that lack resources to generate a similar breadth and depth of scholarship in their own context, and who lack resources to access that content in many peer-reviewed non-open access journals. 

CMAJ Open has complemented the work and capacity of CMAJ and provides a valuable service to both the Canadian and international healthcare systems. We hope that CMA will continue to robustly support avenues for knowledge generation, translation, dissemination and debate, for Canadians and those around the world.