The American Medical Association will cease publication of its ethics journal at the end of this year.
The AMA Journal of Ethics, an open access, peer-reviewed journal was founded in 1999 under the name Virtual Mentor.
“The loss of the AMA JoE will be most acutely felt by medical students and trainees, since it had a unique production model that included them in the process,” said Matthew Wynia, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Colorado whose work has been featured in the journal and who previously led the AMA Institute for Ethics.
The journal publishes monthly issues on a specific theme, such as private equity in health care, antimicrobial resistance, palliative surgery and more. The journal also covered ethics in publishing and research, including a 2015 article titled “How Publish or Perish Promotes Inaccuracy in Science—and Journalism” written by Retraction Watch’s cofounder Ivan Oransky.
The editors for theme issues were selected from a pool of medical students, resident physicians or fellows who brought forth an idea for an issue, and worked closely with the journal’s editorial staff to build it. “This was an absolutely unique experience, and it brought a lot of young people into serious engagement with the AMA for the first time,” Wynia told us.
The journal’s website will remain online with all content freely available, “in keeping with our guiding premise that ethics inquiry is a public good,” Audiey C. Kao, editor-in-chief of the AMA Journal of Ethics and vice president of the AMA’s Ethics Group for more than two decades, wrote in a statement on the journal’s website. “With humility, I am hopeful and confident that this archived journal content will stay evergreen for years to come.”
The AMA did not provide a reason for the decision to shutter the journal. The organization acknowledged our request for comment but told us it had nothing to add beyond the statement.
The journal published 140 articles, reviews and editorials in 2024, and received more than 3.1 million visits to its website that year. According to the AMA’s 2024 annual report, publishing revenue, which accounts for about 12 percent of the organization’s total, decreased by $2.1 million that year, largely because of declines in print advertising in its flagship journals, which include JAMA, JAMA Network Open, and other specialty journals. But AMA Journal of Ethics has always been an online-only, free publication without advertising.
“I don’t know why the AMA decided to eliminate the journal, but it was never a money maker — it had no ads, no subscription fees, and no publication fees — bottom line, no revenues,” Wynia said. “But that’s been true from the beginning.”
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That’s too bad. It’s unfortunately fitting that the “ethics” journals are the first to get cut.