Richard Smith (editor)

Richard Smith is a British medical doctor, editor, and businessman.

He is director of the Ovations initiative to combat chronic disease in the developing world. The initiative is funding centres in China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Tunisia, Tanzania, South Africa, Central America, and the US Mexico border.

Previously he was chief executive of UnitedHealth Europe, a subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group that works with public health systems in Europe. Before that he was editor of the British Medical Journal and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group. Smith worked for the BMJ for twenty-five years, from 1979 to 2004, the last thirteen as editor.

Smith is a proponent of open access publishing. He was editor of the BMJ when the journal first moved to online publishing, and made the journal's archives freely available. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, an open access publisher of scientific and medical research. He was editor in chief of the open-access Cases Journal, which aims to create a database of medical case reports.

He is an honorary professor at the University of Warwick and a member of the governing council of St George’s, University of London.

Having qualified in medicine in the University of Edinburgh, he worked in hospital in Scotland and New Zealand before joining the BMJ. He also worked for six years as a television doctor with the BBC and TV-AM and has a degree in management science from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Smith is the author of the book The Trouble with Medical Journals (2006, ISBN 1-85315-673-6), in which he contends medical journals have become "creatures of the drug industry," rife with fraudulent research and packed with articles ghost written by pharmaceutical companies. He has also written about the limitations and problems of the peer review process.

His brother is comedian Arthur Smith.