I completely agree and thank you for the question. We recently completed a study that demonstrated that Canadian medical journals, such as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, when compared with journals in the United Kingdom and the United States, such as the British Medical Journal and the Journal of the American Medical Association, had five times the number of ads. Some issues of Canadian journals actually had more pages of ads than they did journal content.
There are many studies that have demonstrated that the content of pharmaceutical ads is misleading, and in some cases, even contains inaccuracies. The medications that are advertised in journals are different from the medications that are discussed in the peer-reviewed content of journals.
I completely agree with your point that this is an important area that could easily be redressed. Obviously the reason journals carry ads is to generate revenue, so we did a calculation of how much it would cost each recipient of the Canadian Medical Association Journal to have an ad-free journal instead.
Currently, Canadian physicians, who have an average salary of about $300,000 per year, pay just $12 a year for 18 issues of the Canadian Medical Association Journal delivered right to their door. In order to have that journal ad-free, it would cost only about $48 per year to have the journal delivered 18 times a year to the door of each physician in Canada.
So it would be very easy to make that change to ad-free journals and I think it would be an important step forward.