How the process of peer review became scientific censorship
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3Q4Ldmb)
The peer review process in scientific journals is meant for quality
control, but it has been criticised by editors of prestigious
journals such as Richard Smith of the British Medical Journal,
Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine and
Richard Horton of the Lancet, the latter remarking:
"We know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust,
unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually
ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong"
A bigger problem than inconsistency is reinforcement of prevailing
ideological consensus, as shown by the difficulty of climate change
sceptics in getting their work in print. By contrast, Peter
Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose got a series
of absurd spoof papers published in the journals of various
'grievance studies' such as Gender, Place & Culture. One paper
explained the penis as a social construct, in the second the authors
claimed to have examined thousands of canine genitals to reveal rape
culture in dog parks, the third argued that men could quell their
transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, and the
fourth was a translation of Mein Kampf with feminist buzz words.
Research is judged on acceptability rather than scientific validity,
it seems.
This departure from due diligence is a mystery to many, but it is
explained well by Costica Brada?an in UnHerd of December 21st:
How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying
colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar's subjective opinion
becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because
the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant
ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers
didn't need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only
the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp - dazzling
buzzwords such as 'rape culture', 'queer performativity', 'systemic
oppression' - which mesmerised both journal editors and the external
reviewers.
In 1975, Professor David Horrobin founded the journal Medical
Hypotheses as an outlet for 'revolutionary science'. Instead of peer
review, Horrobin made all publishing decisions as Chief Editor. The
journal was owned by Pergamon, a company established in 1951 by
Robert Maxwell. Pergamon expanded to hundreds of journals and
Maxwell, the media tycoon, made a fortune in selling it to Elsevier
in 1991. Pergamon did not interfere with Medical Hypotheses, but
the new owner did.
After Horrobin died he was replaced by Bruce Charlton. In 2009
Charlton accepted a paper by Peter Duesberg, a virologist at Berkeley
who contested the link between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg supported
the South African government's decision to withhold antiretroviral
drugs from AIDS sufferers. This was sacrilege to the AIDS research
community, which was thriving on huge research grants. Scientists
associated with the U.S. National Institutes of Health threatened
to banish Elsevier journals from the National Library of Medicine
unless the article was retracted. Elsevier relented to pressure and
Charlton was dismissed as Editor. As the Secret Professor wrote
in The Dark Side of Academia (2022): "Peer review had to be
instituted in order to ensure that existing truths were not
threatened again."
Censorial activity escalated with COVID-19. For example, both of
us were denied the right of reply in the prestigious Journal of
Advanced Nursing published by Wiley after being smeared in its
editorial pages over our expressed views on lockdown. One journal
editor - Jose L. Domingo of Food and Chemical Toxicology - who
published a controversial COVID-19 article and also requested
manuscripts "on the potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines"
resigned after concern about "deep discrepancies" with the journal's
direction under publisher Elsevier as the reason for his early exit.
One of us (RW) has raised the possibility that the Committee on
Publication Ethics may be complicit in the process of censoring
academics and editors and has expressed concern over what the
major academic publishers classify as 'misinformation' regarding
COVID-19.
Academic journals are commercial enterprises and are under no
obligation to publish anything sent to them. They favour manuscripts
that are likely to be cited highly to maximise impact factor - a key
measure of journal performance in a competitive marketplace.
A manuscript may be rejected in initial desk screening by the
Editor-in-Chief, subsequent screening by an editor to whom it was
assigned or following peer review. In some cases, an Editor-in-Chief
may overrule the Editor and reject a manuscript. Peer reviewers are
chosen for their specialist expertise, but they merely make
recommendations to editors. They may warn about a manuscript with
contrary findings or controversial claims, and some editors will shy
away from potential trouble.
The extent of retraction of counter-narrative COVID-19 articles, as
tracked by website Retraction Watch is very concerning. If
a manuscript published as an article is subsequently retracted the
convention is that it remains on the website and available at the
original digital object identifier, but with a prominent header
indicating that it has been retracted or a 'Retracted' watermark
across the pages. However, this process has not been followed with
the vast majority of retracted COVID-19 articles. Reputable
publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley and PLOS One have been mounting
retraction notices and completely removing the original articles.
Scientific preprint outlets, which enable researchers to publicise
their findings before peer review, boast of their openness to any
study results. However, just as the sanctuary of freedom of speech
at Speakers Corner fell to the COVID-19 regime, so did the preprint
websites. Several papers on COVID-19 by Professors Norman Fenton
and Martin Neil, despite adhering to scientific standards of analysis
and reporting, were routinely rejected. For example, Fenton and Neil
recently submitted an analysis of ONS vaccine surveillance data to
medRxiv, which responded:
We regret to inform you that your manuscript is inappropriate for
posting. medRxiv is intended for research papers, and our screening
process determined that this manuscript fell short of that
description.
A similar response by arXiv dismissed the article as out of scope,
yet as Fenton and Neil observed, "this is curious given the enormous
number of papers they have on Covid data analytics".
What is to be done? Gatekeepers are manipulating the dissemination
of scientific research, but this is not an easy problem to solve. One
of us (RW) has been an editor on three journals during the COVID-19
period. The only policy of which he is aware is a widespread
agreement across the academic publishing industry to fast-track
COVID-19 manuscripts as a public health priority. He is not aware
of any policies to publish only articles that align with the official
narrative (lockdowns good, masks effective and vaccines safe).
However, pressure is clearly being exerted at some point and it has
extended beyond the publishing industry to the preprint environment.
When research is blocked from preprint exposure, effectively it
doesn't exist. Surely if preprint sites are used properly then we
have nothing to fear from publication of manuscripts that challenge
medical or scientific orthodoxy. If an argument is flawed or analysis
faulty, let these flaws and faults be revealed. As Justice Louis
Brandeis famously said, early in the last century, "sunlight is the
best disinfectant".
Roger Watson was previously the Editor-in-Chief of Journal
of Advanced Nursing, published by Wiley, and is currently the
Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice, published by
Elsevier. He is also an editorial board member of the WIkiJournal
of Medicine. Niall McCrae was an editorial board member of Journal
of Advanced Nursing.
