by Greg Piper
Journal of the Academy of Public Health, whose founders include NIH and FDA nominees, goes against the grain with paid peer review, transparency, absence of gatekeeping. Critics call it a "grift," hypocritical.
Before President Trump nominated them to lead the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, respectively, laid the groundwork for an academic journal on public health that would stand athwart the squelching of scientific dissent and narrative policing endemic to academic publishing around COVID-19.
Now awaiting confirmation, the Stanford and Johns Hopkins medical school professors are handing the reins of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health to their collaborators, including founding editor-in-chief and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who endured social media censorship for his COVID views and firing from Harvard Med for his medical choices.
The house organ of the newly formed Academy of Public Health, JAPH stands apart from similar journals not only in its enthusiasm to challenge COVID-19 dogmas and bite the federal hand that feeds researchers, as evident in its first crop of articles Jan. 30, but in its business model, peer-review process and transparency practices.
APH is an international nonprofit organized under the RealClearFoundation, a sibling to RealClearPolitics and itself a donor-financed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which announced the journal Wednesday and called Bhattacharya and Kulldorff its cofounders.
While at least one author must be an APH member, received papers are published immediately and reviewers are each paid a $500 honorarium and publicly credited, and reviews are published alongside the papers – unusual practices in academic publishing.
JAPH will even publish "external article reviews" of influential papers published in journals without the "same philosophy of open peer-review and scientific discourse" – an unsolicited, public layer of peer review – and invite the authors to respond.
More common: Its open-access model makes JAPH free to read, while authors pay $2,000 to publish research, "literature syntheses" and history articles and $500 for unreviewed "perspectives," though the honorarium for reviewers may be applied to their own publications.
Each APH member gets one free research, synthesis and history article, and an annual free perspective, while authors without research grants or institutional funds can also apply for waived publication fees on a case-by-case basis.
Kulldorff elaborated on the problems in science journals, which in "some ways" are now "hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse," and called JAPH a "proof of concept" for proposed solutions in his opening perspective Jan. 30.
Beneficiaries of the new model include funding agencies, which are "not allowed to see the reviews they paid for" but "will get an external evaluation of the research they fund" through JAPH's model, he said.
Other first-issue articles include a study that found no "significant" differences in COVID case rates or "incidence rate ratios" between neighboring K-12 school districts when one had a mask mandate or when neither had one, and Kulldorff and Bhattacharya's analysis of the "fundamental design flaws in the Covid vaccine trials" contrasted with polio vaccine trials.
Another spotlights the feds' disinterest in enforcing clinical trial reporting requirements despite 2017 regulations adding penalties for noncompliance, with three-quarters of "post-mandate trials not reporting within 12 months and 50.8% not reporting within 36 months."
Failure to enforce appears to be responsible for Moderna hiding a child's death in its COVID booster trial.
The editorial board is a who's who of scientists who have challenged the COVID magisterium, including Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, co-author of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, and Stanford meta-research pioneer John Ioannidis, one of the first to question the data behind early COVID interventions.
Also serving: Stanford's Scott Atlas, the odd man out among President Trump's first-term coronavirus task force; University of Southern Denmark global health professor Christine Stabell Benn, whose research found Pfizer and Moderna vaccines didn't reduce all-cause mortality; and Oxford's Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, whose systematic review of mask research survived an attempted purge by a New York Times columnist.
A dozen involved scientists are in the top 1% of their fields by citations, according to the journal.
COVID catechists are eager to paint the journal as a "grift" and its leaders as bad scientists and hypocrites, with anti-herd immunity author and New York University neurologist Jonathan Howard flooding X on Friday with attacks on scientists associated or aligned with the journal.
He made multiple critical posts on Stabell Benn as well as Bhattacharya and Makary, who are on leave from the editorial board, for alleged complicity in early Trump administration moves Howard dislikes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by virtue of accepting nominations.
Bhattacharya was a target soon after his nomination, building on predecessor Dr. Francis Collins' dismissal of the Great Barrington Declaration coauthors as "fringe epidemiologists" whose growing influence in 2020 – including endorsement by Nobel Prize winner Michael Leavitt – merited a "quick and devastating published take down" from the feds.
Former Senate Finance Committee investigator and science journalist Paul Thacker elaborated on the importance of paying peer reviewers in an essay concurrent with RealClearFoundation's announcement, calling the $500 honorarium higher than "any other similar journal."
"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," wrote Thacker, a late participant in the Twitter Files reporting collaboration.
"We feel this will incentivize good and prompt reviews," editor-in-chief Andrew Noymer, University of California Irvine influenza pandemic researcher and member of the World Health Organization Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 mortality estimation, told Thacker.
The current system of peer review "meaningfully" improves about a third of papers, leaves most "largely untouched" and "can be biased, slow, and driven by non-scientific priorities at times," Ioannidis told Thacker.
Greg Piper
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/trump-nominees-covid-dissenters-launch-science-journal-restore-open
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