(March 13th) The world’s largest science publisher has ordered a journal editor to resign unless he adopts a peer review process to screen out ‘unacceptable’ manuscripts. Jeremy Garwood reports on a debate about the ‘acceptable’ limits to freedom of expression in formal scientific literature.
A dispute has sprung up between publishing giant, Elsevier, and Medical Hypotheses, one of its oddest scientific publications. This 35 year old journal only publishes ideas that its editor-in-chief, Bruce Charlton, finds interesting or radical. It has never adopted a peer review system to screen submitted manuscripts for their acceptability. In a 2007 editorial, Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the UK’s University of Buckingham, pointed to the journal’s rising impact factor (Thomson Scientific IF: from 0.6 in 2004 to 1.3 in 2006) as “a vindication of the ‘editorial review’system for revolutionary science”.
However, a scandal blew up in 2009, when Charlton accepted to publish the paper: “HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective” by Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg is a prominent AIDS “denialist” who maintains that the HIV virus is not the cause of AIDS, arguing in this paper that medical statistics do not support claims of an AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Published online in July, the paper quickly attracted scathing criticism from scientists working on HIV, who demanded that Elsevier withdraw the paper.
Elsevier styles itself as the largest publisher of science and health information with around 2,000 journals. It has recently promoted itself as a purveyor of scientific probity, “establishing standards and policies that improve science communications”, supported the “2009 Peer Review Study”, an international survey of authors and reviewers that aims to provide insights into questions such as: “What does peer review do for science and what does the scientific community want it to do?” and “Will peer review illuminate good ideas or shut them down?” In this context, Elsevier has not appreciated the scandal over Medical Hypotheses.
The publisher immediately retracted Duesberg’s paper together with one by Marco Ruggiero, a molecular biologist at the University of Florence, also accused of AIDS denialist tendencies. It then used The Lancet, Elsevier’s leading medical journal, to retrospectively ‘peer review’ Duesberg’s controversial paper. Five anonymous experts unanimously condemned the paper as unsuitable for publication and in February 2010, Duesberg was told that it had been “permanently withdrawn”.
Not content with removing these “rogue” articles, Elsevier convened an anonymous panel of experts to review the future of Medical Hypotheses. An Elsevier spokesman said: “We took this step because we received serious expressions of concern about the impact of the dissemination of these articles on global healthcare.”
On 22nd January, Elsevier told Charlton that their external panel had concluded that Medical Hypotheses must now become a peer-reviewed journal. Furthermore, potentially controversial papers must receive “careful scrutiny” with the automatic exclusion of some topics, including “hypotheses that could be interpreted as supporting racism”.
It told Charlton to implement the changes immediately or to resign. His contract, that expires at the end of 2010, will not be renewed.
Charlton says he has received considerable support for maintaining the journal’s existing format with more than 150 letters. As a response to online reports of Elsevier’s demands, Times Higher Education displays more than 180 pages filled with readers’ comments, most of which support the journal against the publisher’s dictatorial “censorship”.
Medical Hypotheses has never hidden its publication policy. Indeed, it has been central to the journal’s aims since it was founded in 1975 by David Horrobin, a prominent medical researcher, entrepreneur, and critic of the anonymous peer review system. Horrobin founded Medical Hypotheses precisely because he felt that peer review stifled creativity and innovation in science. The journal was to provide an outlet for unorthodox ideas and research that would not be evaluated by other scientists before publication, a resort for thinkers who were “very good at generating ideas, but are complete klutzes in the field”. It was committed to publishing ideas based only on whether he or other editorial reviewers considered them “interesting and reasonable”. His ideas gained support - the founding advisory board of Medical Hypotheses included the Nobel prize winners, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, John Eccles, Linus Pauling, and ‘the’ philosopher of science himself, Karl Popper.
However, when Elsevier bought the journal in 2002, shortly before Horrobin’s death, they were no doubt more interested in its profitability. Charlton says the journal has succeeded in this respect: “It makes a profit, the 2008 Thomson ISI Impact Factor is 1.416 (much better than average, and rising), and I know from internal sources that there are half a million papers downloaded per year - which is equivalent download usage to the prestigious Journal of Theoretical Biology.” The editorial adviory board still includes distinguished scientists such as Nobelist, Arvid Carlsson.
Indeed a majority of the editorial board supports Charlton’s stand against Elsevier. One member said that he agreed the Duesberg paper was wrong “but I think demanding that the entire journal be destroyed is an over-reaction. When science has no place left for annoying dissenters it will have lost a basic component of honesty that is central to getting the enterprise.”
For Charlton, the only honest options are leaving the journal as it is, or closing it down, since it would not be “ethically acceptable to launch a new ‘imposter’ journal, with utterly different aims, procedures and personnel.”
Furthermore, Elsevier’s firm stance on the virtues of peer review appear a touch hypocritical in the light of the revelation in April, 2009 that the pharmaceutical company, Merck, had paid the publishers to create several issues of a fake scientific journal that appeared to be peer-reviewed but that was in fact only filled with articles favouring its drug products.