Pandemic Censorship Spurs Trump Research Nominees and Others to Create “Journal of the Academy of Public Health”

As traditional journals die, transparency, speed and an end to gatekeeping become a new model.

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A group of scientists including Trump’s nominees to run the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have debuted a new science journal to improve scientific communication and increase the diversity of expert views, especially those silenced during the pandemic.

Among the publication’s board members are Stanford research physician John Ioannidis, one of the most highly cited scientists on the planet, and Stanford health policy researcher Jay Bhattacharya, along with Johns Hopkins surgeon and public policy expert Marty Makary. Bhattacharya has taken a leave of absence from the journal after Trump nominated him to run the NIH, as has Makary who Trump nominated to run the FDA.

“This is exactly the type of journal we need to replace traditional medical journals where there is far too much censorship and vested interest among peer reviewers, editors, and owners,” said Peter Gøtzsche, a professor of clinical research at the University of Copenhagen and JAPH board member. “Some of us regard traditional journals as more or less dead.”

The “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” (JAPH) plans to cover all aspects of public health, and will publish research articles, literature reviews, peer-reviewed studies on the history of public health, and perspectives. The JAPH will also run peer-reviews of prominent studies published in journals that do not practice open peer-review to spur scientific discourse. “The authors of the original article are invited to respond,” the JAPH states.

The journal is nonprofit and open access and will operate under four premises:

• Publish all peer reviews of research articles. Peer reviews are not anonymous in JAPH, and each has its own DOI.

• Publish every manuscript submission that we receive from members of the Academy of Public Health.

• Publish very quickly, without leaving researchers in limbo pondering the fate of their manuscript.

• Reward peer reviewers with a generous honorarium, more than any other similar journal.

• Charge authors modest article processing fees (waived for the first issue, and for all first-time submitters)

While many journals are open access, meaning they are available for free to the public, few if any journals pay researchers to peer review, time spent reading and critiquing an article by other authors to improve quality and catch obvious errors. Scientists now grumble that peer review is “free work” they provide to journals, which then charge them high fees when it comes time for them to publish their own studies in that same journal. The JAPH will pay peer reviewers a $500 honoraria to critique articles and reviews submitted by other scientists, and that money may be applied to cover publication fees.

“Doing reviews is work and work deserves compensation,” says Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health at UC-Irvine and co-editor-in-chief of JAPH. “We feel this will incentivize good and prompt reviews.”

Stanford’s Ioannidis said only a handful of the roughly 50,000 journals now on the market pay peer reviewers a small fee, and increasing this to $500 might improve quality. “Peer review currently improves about a third of the submitted papers meaningfully, makes about 5% worse, and leaves most papers largely untouched. Moreover, it can be biased, slow, and driven by non-scientific priorities at times,” he said. “This does not guarantee that any new approach will be better – but it is worth trying.”

In keeping with an open access philosophy, JAPH will publish the peer reviews alongside the article, so that readers can get a sense of the entire scientific discourse. The journal editors feel that publishing a piece along with the criticism, will end some current problems in science such as gatekeeping by editors who reject studies that don’t meet a political litmus test.

“You want a process to expose the research and the peer review, to allow the discourse,” said Oxford researcher Carl Heneghan, another JAPH board member. “The journals have been part of the censorship problem, taking certain lines, in favor of masks and lockdowns. The BMJ has published some terrible articles, and they should be ashamed of them and taken down.”

Writing the JAPH’s first perspective piece, founding editor-in-chief Martin Kulldorff detailed the long history of scientific journals starting in 1655 in France with “Journal des Sҫavans” (Journal of the Learned). Today, young scientists know that publishing a study in a prestigious journal such as Science, Nature, or Lancet can make or break an entire career. Yet problems persist, Kulldorf writes:

Without public trust, the scientific community will lose the generous support that it receives from taxpayers, and if that happens, science will wither and wane.

The prestige of a journal is not even a good testament of article quality. Let’s look The Lancet as an example. Published by Elsevier, it is considered one of the five “top medical journals.” Under its current editor Richard Horton, the journal has published a study falsely suggesting that the MMR vaccine may cause autism,¹⁶ leading to less vaccinations and more measles; a Covid “consensus” piece questioning infection-acquired immunity, something we have known about since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC; and the now infamous paper claiming that the Covid lab leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory.

Perhaps some of the biggest pandemic flubs have been published in Science Magazine, whose editor Holden Thorp politicized the COVID origin question, while science writers for the magazine’s news section, including Jon Cohen, have written false and misleading articles that misled the public about research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Noymer said that the scientific community has still failed to ask hard questions about the origin of COVID, even after the Biden administration’s recent intelligence assessment which finds the COVID virus likely escaped from a lab in Wuhan. “It seems to me and others that there should be some journal articles out there making a similar case,” he said. “The scientific community should not cede the discourse to the intelligence agencies.”

“We can’t have a dominant paradigm become a monologue,” Noymer added. “Our goal is to have a diversity of opinion backed up by solid reasoning and data.”