Richard Smith

Prior to joining the health services management group UnitedHealth Europe, Dr Richard Smith was editor of the British Medical Journal for 25 years and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group. During that time the BMJ became one of the first journals to embrace open publishing online. It reached out to another million readers a month and the group quadrupled in size.

Dr. Smith has a long-standing interest in the ethical impact of the Web on science and is a highly vocal advocate of the need for transparency. He is a member of the board of the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organisation committed to making scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

A graduate in medicine from Edinburgh, he worked in hospital medicine in New Zealand and Scotland before joining the BMJ. He has written and broadcast on a wide range of topics and has a degree in management science from the Stanford Business School. He is a visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.