Come close young Canadian medical students.
For I have a story that will make you piss in your scrubs.
Your beloved research papers, the ones that you hoped would get you the good jobs in hospitals, the ones that would eventually get you tenure at prime universities, may be out there in the ether.
Or they may be languishing somewhere on some server mid-Atlantic because a few Canadian publishers are taking big payouts and selling you out to off shore interests.
This year, medical publishing in this country finally entered the Theatre of the Absurd.
It all began a few months ago, when a company out of India began courting independent Canadian medical publishers offering them stacks of sweaty money if they would sell their companies. To the publishers, they seemed legit. They had a whopping big website -- though if the sellers had read them, they'd probably notice a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes.
The publishers were assured that it would be business as usual at their beloved journals. The only change would come once the transition happened, when the journals would be produced in little sweatshops by nameless, faceless, feckless tribes of copyeditors and designers.
Meanwhile, the publishers would be rewarded for their good work, and could aspire to scratch golfing. Or condo buying. Or both.
Canadian managing editors and designers were let go and the "new partners" were finally in charge.
The transition began, and that's when the trouble started.
Manuscripts disappeared. The doctors in charge could no longer access their files. New websites popped up full of errors and typos.
The old publishers were horrified as they watched all their good work crumble into rubble. The Internet was full of vitriol. The blame game began.
Then one enterprising editor-in-chief googled the new parent company.
This is what he found.
Amazing that the publishers hadn't done the same.
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