Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.
“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.
Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.
The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.
Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.
I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?
To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.
On that last paragraph, you’ll probably be able to call yourself a prophet. I would not be at all surprised if that were next.
Is this even legal?
The First Amendment is the one about freedom of speech and press.
The idea isn’t just to prevent “government scientists” from publishing in whatever journals they want.
The idea is that with an in-house journal, they can censor whatever research they don’t like and publish whatever made up fantasies and delusions they come up with.
These are the people who claimed that chloroquine and Ivermectin treated the Covid-19 virus and that hospitals were deliberately killing Covid-19 patients with vents because they got paid for each patient that died.
This is what happens when you appoint a crackpot who hates science and medicine to run government agencies based on science and medicine.
Sigh, this is, imho, one of those cases, like many, in which he is hopelessly wrong, but.. slightly right at the same time, but for the entirely wrong reasons. The top journals didn’t get to be that, sadly, by publishing so that everyone has access, they charge people stupid amounts of money to get access to the data. This is why there are literally groups out there that use donated money to buy access to this stuff, then republish it in “open” journals, so that people can actually do freaking science. So, in that respect, he is not entirely wrong – we can’t have journals placing information behind expensive pay walls, which effectively prevent people from having access, and being able to both compare their research to others, know what to run research on (to replicate existing research), and so on. Also, many of those journals will not publish papers that flat out say, “We tried this, and no, it didn’t actually work.”, which again, massively important information to have if you are another researcher, both because a) it tells you what they tried, and you can check if they maybe missed something, or goofed in their testing, and b) what to not bother with, if its clear it won’t work, and there are no other avenues to try to test the idea.
But, would I trust this government, and anyone picked by RFK, to produce a journal that was a) truly open, b) honest, and c) didn’t charge even more f-ing money to access it, in some delusional attempt to prevent anyone but the US from doing science (or just only those people RFK approves of doing it)? Hell no.
Do problems exist with existing journals? Yes. Is RFK actually trying to solve those problems, instead of utterly imaginary ones, and thus making things even worse? Nope, he is definitely just making things worse, as usual.
Why start a new journal? Just force everyone to publish in Mad Magazine. Come for the humor! Stay for the corrupt right wing conspiracy mongering!
RFK Jr accuses the major medical journals of being corrupt. I suppose it’s too much to expect something like evidence from Grima Wormbrain. Isn’t there also a question of First Amendment rights?
I read today that some German scientists are trying to save PubMed from going dark.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/germany-plans-global-alternative-to-pubmed/ar-AA1FFp42
It’s an all-out attack on science, knowledge and reason. Led by brain worm guy.
How dystopianly Soviet RFK is. Having grown up during the Cold War, he seems to have taken some of those lessons to heart.
@ Raven#2
Did you forget which timeline we are in? Legal doesn’t matter anymore. That ship, while always a little questionable, has sailed over the horizon by now.
I think RFK Jr’s been living his life as a slow burn revenge arc for his dad’s assassination. Now he has the power to go full Joker mode and burn it all down. Every supervillain has their tragic origin story.
Meanwhile, in a dingy, moldy office above a seedy gym, the Disco Tooters stir.
Strapping the electrodes on the dead “journal,” Bio Complexity, they throw the switch and … and … and … IT’S ALIVE!!
The brainworm is alive and well and controlling Robert F*cking Kennedy jr’s mind pushing us down the death spiral.
https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/
“Make America Healthy Again” Aims to Make Public Health Your Responsibility The message coming from the Trump administration is: “Take care of yourselves — because we won’t.”
THE major defining characteristic to me of idealogues is their desire to control all independent sources of information.
When individuals have differing viewpoints or ideologies, but can agree to examine the evidence or have a rational argument, there is room to work. As soon as they start trying to muzzle those sources of information, you can’t even have a conversation with them. The commonality with religion is that neither group will accept anything other than their internal “truth”, and refuses to test that truth against reality.
The important thing is, at long last Little Bobby is getting more attention than his daddy or his uncles. Poor dear!
Surely the point is to be able to label propaganda as “scientific research” in a way that will fool non-scientists.
Q: “Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal?”
A: Because “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.”
That is, if they (and this specifically applies to government scientists) want to publish, there would be no other option.
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BTW, I think sheila has got it right.