FIX EXCLUSIVES
‘Unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there and we’re going to create our own journals inhouse’
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s idea to have federal scientists publish in-house instead of in “corrupt” journals drew some interest from academic experts who spoke to The College Fix.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, JAMA [the Journal of the American Medical Association], New England Journal of Medicine, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said on the “Ultimate Human” podcast in June.
Kennedy criticized the close relationship between large pharmaceutical companies and academic journals, alleging the drug corporations use the publications to add credibility to their products.
“Unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there and we’re going to create our own journals inhouse,” he said shortly later in the interview.
The HHS did not respond to two emailed requests for comment in the past month asking for more information on Kennedy’s remarks, policies on NIH-funded research, and comments on public access to taxpayer-funded science.
Similarly, the press offices of The Lancet, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine did not respond to two inquiries in the past month about Kennedy’s comments and their views on open access to government-funded science.
However, in July, the National Institutes of Health announced all taxpayer-funded studies would be immediately available for free once accepted for publication in a journal.
A doctor with a medical reform group said Kennedy’s concerns are valid, even if the rhetoric may seem controversial. Already some of Kennedy’s agenda is in motion, Dr. Kurt Miceli with Do No Harm told The Fix via an emailed statement.
“In late April, Dr. Bhattacharya, Director for the National Institutes of Health, issued a statement committed to ‘pushing the accelerator’ on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public,” Miceli stated. He said this move promotes transparency and builds public trust.
Miceli said taxpayer-funded studies “can’t go unpublished when the results aren’t favorable to the authors or scientific journals themselves.” He cited a federally funded study on puberty blockers that was delayed for years, calling it an example of unacceptable suppression when children’s well-being is involved.
The author, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, delayed releasing the results of the study, funded with $10 million in taxpayer dollars, because she worried it would be used to undermine transgender drugs and surgeries for minors.
Miceli said “legitimate concerns” remain about bias in prominent publications.
“To uphold scientific credibility, journals must take a hard look at their peer-review and editorial practices,” he said. “Safeguarding the integrity of science … requires a steadfast commitment to objectivity, not partisanship.”
A professor at Stanford University, who also served as an official in Health and Human Services, said the current commercial publishing model is “not sustainable.”
Robert Kaplan directed The Fix to two recent op-eds in Academe Blog and The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he outlines how for-profit journals reap large profits from federally funded science while charging the public to read it. He is also the former editor of two academic journals.
However, Kaplan warned against a government-run alternative. “A government-run system would bring other serious problems, including low trust and potential for political interference with science,” he said in an email to The Fix.
Instead, Kaplan favors a model led by academic institutions. He said implementation details and challenges are explored in greater depth in his Chronicle article.
Kaplan has previously argued that scholarly societies often resist open-access reforms because their publishing arms have become revenue sources. In a 2019 Los Angeles Times essay, he described for-profit publishers as “holding university libraries hostage” with high subscription costs.
In a 2020 STAT essay, he said that even nonprofit scientific societies sometimes oppose reforms in order to preserve journal revenue, despite being funded largely through unpaid academic labor.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ‘Ultimate Human’ podcast; ‘Ultimate Human’/YouTube
