The Vibe comes for Academic Publishing – Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen —  10 February 2025 —   1800 words

There is a long list of things that have been singled out as needing fixing in our current system of academic scientific publishing.   Among these are:

Publication bias:   The tendency to only publish positive results, leading to an incomplete picture of research findings and potentially misleading conclusions. 

Editorial Bias:  In many journals, even those held in highest esteem,  Editors determine what will be published, and this has led to what many see as huge biases in favor of some scientific viewpoints and against others.  In some fields, papers that do not support the generalized consensus in a field of study simply stand no chance of publication.

Paywalls:  Many scientific articles are behind paywalls, limiting access to research for scientists in developing countries and the general public. 

Opaque peer review:  The peer-review process, where experts evaluate research before publication, can be opaque and subject to biases, with reviewers sometimes not fully disclosing their identities or conflicts of interest.

Profit-driven publishing:   For-profit publishers can prioritize profits over the dissemination of knowledge, leading to high subscription costs and limited access. 

Lack of reproducibility:   Difficulty in replicating published research findings, which can undermine the credibility of scientific results. 

There have been repeated calls for a new paradigm in which scientific publishing is truly open, transparent, accessible, and sustainable.  Some of these efforts include: 

1. Brian Nosek the co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (http://cos.io/) that operates the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/).

2.  John P.A. Ioannidis  — a proponent of Evidence Based Medicine and author of the famous “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” which found “claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”  Ioannidis had strong views about the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and has published 81 papers (link is a download .doc) on the subject as author or co-author.

3.  Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky:   (the co-founders of Retraction Watch) opined last year in the Washington Post: “An epidemic of scientific fakery threatens to overwhelm publishers” lamenting the rising tide of poor and often fake scientific papers published in junk and predatory journals.

And there are many, many more. 

Now, in the field of Public Health, a new journal has been created.  The reaction?  The online magazine WIRED just published:

Donald Trump’s NIH Pick Just Launched a Controversial Scientific Journal

authored by Emily Mullin and Matt Reynolds, it is both a political attack and an attack from selected scientists.

What is the new journal?  It is the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.    The Academy itself is new and its internet Home Page states:

“The Academy of Public Health

The Academy of Public Health is an international association of public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties. Members are united in their commitment to open discourse, intellectual rigor and broad, equitable access to scientific discovery.

The goal of the Academy is to promote open and transparent scientific discourse on science and public health. The vehicle for doing so shall be through its associated journal, the open access and open peer-reviewed Journal of the Academy of Public Health.”

And who is responsible?

The Founding Board members are:

Sander Greenland – Academy Member  [ see here and here ]

George F Tidmarsh – Academy Member  [ see here and here ]

David DesRosiers – Independent Board member [ President of the RealClear Foundation ]

The Journal’s Editorial Board is made up of: (long list, with links)

Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Founding Editor-in-Chief

Andrew Noymer, MSc, PhD, Editor-in-Chief

Carl Heneghan, BM, DPhil

Christine Stabell Benn, MD, PhD, DMSc

David Livermore, PhD

Günter Kampf, MD

Helen Colhoun, DMed, MPH

Jayanta Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, (on leave — Donald Trump named Bhattacharya as his choice to lead the National Institutes of Health)

Jim Buttery, MD

John Ioannidis, MD, DSc

Maged Kamel Boulos, MD, PhD

Marty Makary, MD, MPH, (on leave)

Mohammad Ali Mansournia, MD, MPH, PhD

Peter Gøtzsche, MD, DMSc, MSc   [co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration]

Ruth Gil Prieto, PhD

Sander Greenland, DrPH

Scott Atlas, MD

Sergio Recuenco, MD, MPH, DrPH

Simon Wood, PhD

Sunetra Gupta, PhD

Tom Jefferson, MD, MSc

One would hard pressed to find a group of people with more expertise and prestige in the world of Public Health.   

So what is the objection to the new Journal of the Academy of Public Health?    Mostly Politics

U.S. Two-Party Politics:

Marty Makary is on leave from the Editorial Board of the Journal because he has been tapped by President Trump to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Jayanta Bhattacharyais also on leave from the Editorial Board, having been tapped by President Trump to head The National Institutes of Health.

The RealClear Foundation  publishes the Journal of the Academy of Public Heath as nonprofit journal subsidiary.   RealClear is labelled in the Wired piece as a “right-wing news site” – meaning mostly that it is not a left-leaning media outlet. 

Public Health Politics:

Worse yet, many of the board members were signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, which recommended against many of the governmental policies and mandates meant to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

And besides politics?

“Some experts are worried that the journal, which has links to the right-wing news site RealClearPolitics, could become a scientific mouthpiece for the Trump administration and a platform that these experts allege could publish dubious research.” [ Wired ]

Notice that the ‘experts’ are unnamed.

And making a very important point about science and medical  research is Gigi Gronvall:

 “This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,” says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.”

Besides not being asked to join, Gronvall may be objecting to point 4 of the journal’s Four Pillars:

“The Journal of the Academy of Public Health has Four Pillars that distinguish it: 

1. Open access, so that scientific articles can be read by all scientists and anyone in the public. 
2. Open peer reviews that anyone can read at the same time as they read articles; signed by the reviewer. 
3. Rewarding reviewers with an honorarium and public acknowledgement. 
4. Removal of article gatekeeping, letting the Academy of Public Health’s distinguished scientists freely publish all their research results in a timely and efficient manner, together with their associated peer reviews.” 

From the by-laws:

In the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, members of the Academy may publish any public health related scientific article on which they are co-author, and as specified in the Author Guidelines of the Journal.

…

Any member of the Journal Editorial Board may invite prominent public health scientists as new members of the Academy by sending a written invitation to join the Academy. Nominations may be submitted without prior consultation with the nominated public health scientist, and acceptance by the invitee will result in immediate induction into the Academy.

…

Academy members may nominate prominent public health scientists to be new members. Nominations should be sent to the Academy Board.

…

The only criteria for membership shall be the quality and extent of their already published public health work.”

And while Gigi Gronvall  may feel left out, all she need do to be included is to do good work and be nominated by any member of the editorial Board or member of the Academy itself.   Calling their Journal “a club newsletter” is like referring to the Royal Society’s journals “Philosophical Transactions”, “Proceedings A” and “Proceedings B” as club newsletters because one hasn’t been invited to join the Royal Society – whose membership is determined by a very similar procedure.  The Royal Society’s journals are today operated similarly to the Science, Nature, and Elsevier.

Wired goes on with another detractor: “Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, believes the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around established scientific consensus. “If you can create the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines and masks are effective ways of controlling the pandemic, then you can undermine that notion of scientific consensus, you can create uncertainty, and you can push a particular agenda forward”.   Bergstrom is apparently not interested in the validity of scientific studies, only whether or not they support his favored pre-existing consensuses while simultaneously fearing that open peer-review will not automatically disqualify non-consensus-supporting papers.      

Kulldorff [Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Founding Editor-in-Chief] told WIRED that the journal will be a venue for open discourse and academic freedom. “I think it’s important that scientists can publish what they think is important science, and then that should be open for discussion, instead of preventing people from publishing”.

The Wired authors reached out to a lot of scientists to find negative viewpoints, including

“Taylor Dotson, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who studies the intersection of science and politics”  who is quoted saying:

“The worst-case scenario is you start having the journals for the people who are kind of populist and anti-establishment and the journals for the people who also read NPR and The New York Times.”

At least Dotson concedes, with caveats:     “These are good steps,” says Dotson. “It’s good that it is trying to push against the power of the big scientific publishers.” But the researcher also warns that open-access studies might be more prominent and widely cited in the media just because they are easier to find and not because they are necessarily more scientifically rigorous.” [ Wired ]

Dotson fails, of course , as many do, to point out that just because a paper is published in one of the  more prominent journals does not make it “necessarily more scientifically rigorous”. 

Bottom Lines:

1.       In the medical field, Public Health, there is a new journal based on many of the features being widely recommended to reform the subject of Scientific/Academic Publishing. It is The Journal of the Academy of Public Health.

2.  It is fully Open Access – anyone with access to the internet can freely read all articles, papers and commentaries, including all the reviewer’s comments and author’s responses.

3.   Reviewers are both paid an honorarium and given credit for their efforts by being publicly named.

4.   Members of the Academy of Public Health [pdf of organizing document] are free to publish “all their research results” bypassing the gatekeeping seen in other journals.

5.  The Journal’s Editorial Board is made up of some of the most distinguished and widely published researchers in the fields of Public Health and Epidemiology.

6.  Most of the attack points being made against the journal are political:  based on the perceived association of many of the members with conservative issues, that they may have contrarian views on the public health policies instituted during the Covid pandemic, and the tendency of many of the members of the Editorial Board not being the proper “go along to get along”-type of researchers. 

7. The new journal is a good sign that “The Vibe” may be changing in scientific publishing as well.

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Author’s Comment:

The status quo – the entrenched scientific publishers –  do not want to give up their lucrative business models.   Academics and researchers who have made their reputations supporting consensus views fear good science findings that may invalidate those consensuses.

This new effort in Public Health will not be easily shouted down by nay-sayers. The widely recognized quality of their Editorial Board members will (hopefully) make the journal unassailable.

The WIRED article even attacks one Board Member for supporting the “lab leak” theory, which has recently been acknowledged as most likely by the CIA.  

Let’s support the new effort of Open Access publishing as best we can. 

Thanks for reading.

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