Editors, Publishers, Impact Factors, and Reprint Income, by Harvey Marcovitch*

“...Editors under Pressure—Avoiding Conflicts
Editors would like to imagine they are simply gatekeepers who facilitate the interaction between authors who wish to impart information and people who want to read it. In fact, they are subject to a raft of external pressures that interfere with this core task. Coauthors are prone to disputes with each other and with reviewers; rejected authors may protest; readers may be dissatisfied; institutions may react inadequately to editors' concerns about probity; editorial freedom may be compromised by the demands of the learned society that owns the journal; and a commercial publisher might exert subtle—or unsubtle—pressure to increase profitability. All of these distractions increase the possibility of competing interests corrupting the editorial process…. ...It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal…"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964337/