Scientists worry about possible publishing ban

Scientists are concerned about the potential of being banned from publishing in leading medical journals after comments from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services.

In an episode of the Ultimate Human podcast, Kennedy said the US government might prohibit federally-funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and The Lancet, which he accused of being “corrupt” and under the influence of pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy said that unless existing medical journals change radically, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will establish its own medical journals and publish papers in-house.

“It’s really very concerning,” says Angie Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, who edits the journal Vaccine. “All of these reputable medical journals undergo a peer review process, and they have very strict standards.”

At the moment, these journals are also seen by US government officials as effective loudspeakers and sources of information. Officials from the Food and Drug Administration recently launched a new COVID-19 vaccine policy by announcing it in an NEJM paper. Meanwhile, media reports note that Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again report cites studies published in JAMA, NEJM, The Lancet, and their affiliates 26 times.

The NIH is pulling back from publishing in other realms. Last month, C&EN reported that two journals funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paused accepting new manuscripts, citing “changes in operational resources,” after receiving letters from the US Department of Justice questioning their objectivity.

Rasmussen says Kennedy’s claims about corruption at the medical journals and influence of Big Pharma are “unsupported and don’t hold up.” She sees a lack of understanding of how science’s correction process and peer review work. She notes, for instance, that new studies may refute previous findings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the original works were faked or fatally flawed and need to be retracted.

“The peer review process is not perfect, and it’s not intended to set things scientifically in stone forever and ever,” Rasmussen notes. “But it is a way of getting experts to actually vet scientific results before they are published so that you can have more confidence in them.”

Rasmussen suspects her journal might also hear from the US at some point. And she worries that the NIH will institute a policy that limits the number of journals in which US-based researchers and those funded by US agencies can publish.

“Journals and the scientific process and the evidence-based process is really antithetical to what the current administration seems to be doing,” Rasmussen says. “I do expect them to continue pushing back against journals. This is part of a larger effort to really undermine science in the US.”