Dark Mode Light Mode

Anti-Trust in Scientific Journals — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Anti-Trust in Scientific Journals — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal Anti-Trust in Scientific Journals — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Scientific journals emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as the principal way in which scientists and the public shared scientific ideas and discoveries. Journals met the need for dissemination of research results so that the scientific community could challenge, debate, test, replicate, and refine scientific claims. Timely publication of studies in so-called peer-reviewed journals became an essential step in obtaining scientific knowledge.

Journal papers are foundational building blocks in the political and legal realm. Scientific studies, peer reviewed and published in journals, are necessarily relied upon by expert witnesses in their opinions in judicial proceedings, as well as in the promulgation of sound regulatory and legislative rules that protect our health and safety.

For some time, the practice of scientific publication has suffered from threats to the integrity and validity of published papers.












For some time, however, the practice of scientific publication has suffered from threats to the integrity and validity of published papers. These threats undermine trust in science, as well as public health and the rule of law.

We do not have to look hard for evidence that the foundation is crumbling. Criticisms of science publishing practices have been around for some time, especially in the field of epidemiology of potential health risks. In 1999, a prominent epidemiologist, Lewis Kuller, published a commentary, “Circular Epidemiology,” which criticized the practice of publishing studies that showed associations that were already well established, or consistently ruled out, without adding any increased analytical rigor.

We do not have to look hard for evidence that the foundation of scholarly publishing is crumbling.












A few years after Kuller’s commentary, in 2005, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis published a paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” which raised consciousness of a crisis in the failure of replication or reproducibility of biomedical studies. Ioannidis identified several factors that correlated highly with false findings in the medical literature, for example that using small study sample sizes, chasing ever-smaller putative effect sizes, data dredging, exercising undue flexibility in study designs, failing to pre-specify statistical tests and key variable definitions, withholding financial and non-financial conflicts of interest, and engaging in advocacy and sensationalism were all associated with false and non-replicable research findings.

Within a few years of Ioannidis’s 2005 paper, awareness of and concern over the “replication crisis” spread beyond biomedical research to other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and economics. Concerns over replication soon entered the popular discourse. In 2010, David H. Freedman wrote an essay in The Atlantic, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” which presented Ioannidis’s and others’ work for a general audience. Freedman did not water down the message when he wrote that “much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flatout wrong.”

Proliferation of Junk Science

The erosion of trust in the validity of published studies disrupts the down-stream process of aggregating and evaluating data on specific issues across studies. In the last couple of decades, the systematic review in biomedical research has emerged as the gold-standard methodology to synthesize data across studies and to assess whether causal inferences are justified. The systematic reviewer must clearly state the research question and pre-specify what kinds of studies, with what kinds of study designs and included measurements, will be considered as offering important and valid information to answer the pending question. This pre-specification process is designed to prevent opportunistic, post-hoc reliance upon poorly conducted research that aligns with the reviewers’ preferences.

The proliferation of papers with “fishy data,” however, has undermined the validity of meta-research that synthesizes data across studies, to reach conclusions with more robust data sets. A recent 2024 report in Science noted that scientists now undertaking systematic reviews must wade through mounds of published detritus to find studies that are worthy of inclusion in their reviews. Scientists themselves are losing trust in the available datasets and analyses, with the result that the whole enterprise of “systematic reviews,” and seeking broad conclusions from many studies, is in peril. The high prevalence of “fake papers” compromises research synthesis and causal inference.

Unfortunately, not all systematic reviewers are discerning in what studies they include in their research syntheses. Back in 2016, Professor Ioannidis noted that the thoughtless proliferation of studies had already expanded to include the metastasis of poorly conducted systematic reviews. In his paper “The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses,” Ioannidis described the fulsome production of poorly conducted systematic reviews as undermining evidence-based health care and eroding trust in medical science.

In 2023, various journals retracted over 10,000 research papers.












What Goes Up Must Come Down—Retractions

Consumers rightly interpret frequent product recalls as evidence of manufacturing defects. In the world of scientific publishing, publishers have long used retraction as a way to remove their imprimatur from a published article later found to have deviated from scientific or editorial standards of care. Historically, retractions were rare events. In 2023, however, various journals retracted over 10,000 research papers. Dr. Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of the website Retraction Watch, has argued that, although the rate of retractions is increasing, it is not keeping up with the number of defective articles published. Unlike a recall of a manufactured product, journals do not refund the costs of purchasing the retracted article.

Unlike a recall of a manufactured product, journals do not refund the costs of purchasing the retracted article.












Editors in Revolt

Late last year, almost all of the editors of the Journal of Human Evolution, published by Elsevier, resigned in protest over what appears to have been Elsevier’s policy of maximizing profit without regard for scientific quality. Elsevier increased charges to authors for article processing and reduced various forms of editorial support, oversight, and editing. According to the website Retraction Watch, the mass resignation of editors at this journal was the 20th such event since early 2023.

Predatory Journals

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine and several other clinical medical journals published an editorial, “Predatory Journals—What Can We Do to Protect Their Prey?,” to call attention to the growing problem of journals published for financial gain that flout scholarly standards and prey upon young scientists eager to build their curricula vitae. The editorial’s 16 authors estimated that over 15,000 journals, as of 2021, were polluting the scientific information ecosystem with grossly inadequate editing, peer review, and management of conflicts of interest. The authors noted that many of the predatory journals ignore or otherwise fail to comply with the ethical and publication standards of well-respected groups such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Some of the questionable journals fabricate citation metrics to lure unsuspecting scientists to submit their manuscripts and convince universities to subscribe.

Why the Failure?

The present situation in the world of scientific-journal publishing has all the earmarks of a market failure. Commercial publishers have invaded the market for scientific publications and driven prices through the roof. According to one recent provocative review, “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward,” scientific societies, which had been the mainstay for publishing papers in the 19th and early-20th centuries, charged a couple of dollars per article as late as 1992, while commercial publishers were already charging about $44 an article. Today, the prices for both types of publishers are even higher, often with additional charges to access letters to the editor, in which problems with the published article are detailed.

If lawyers looked at retracted articles as defective “products,” they might well invoke consumer-protection laws. We might also see claims by granting organizations and researchers for detrimental reliance upon retracted articles. Many publishers delay retractions, however, leaving the scientific community to rely upon dodgy science. When articles are retracted, some journals continue to leave the retracted article behind a paywall, and, in some instances, contrary to the publishing guidelines of groups such as COPE, publishers also leave the notice of retraction behind a paywall.

Not surprisingly, the lawsuit industry has not acquiesced to caveat emptor for the world of scientific publishing. With profits for commercial scientific-journal publishers approaching 40 percent, lawyers would naturally see publishers as both unpopular and enticing targets. Last year, a prominent plaintiffs’ law firm filed a class action on behalf of Professor Lucina Uddin and others against Elsevier and several other commercial publishers. Uddin’s complaint, filed in federal court in Brooklyn, was styled as an “Antitrust Class Action to Challenge Collusion among the World’s Six Largest For-profit Publishers of Peer-reviewed Scholarly Journals.” The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants violated federal antitrust laws through unlawful agreements in restraint of trade, designed to maintain high prices and exorbitant profits. The lawsuit seeks treble damages from the publishers and injunctions against their business practices.

The plaintiffs allege that the defendants violated federal antitrust laws through unlawful agreements in restraint of trade.












Uddin’s complaint outlines three theories of unlawful anti-trust restraint of trade. First, Uddin alleges that the scheme flows from a supposed agreement among the defendants not to compensate authors and scholars for their articles or for serving as peer reviewers to the journals in question. Second, Uddin asserts that the single submission rule, which requires authors to submit a manuscript to only one journal at a time and await each journal’s decision, is an unlawful restraint of trade. Third, Uddin alleges that the publishers colluded to impose a gag rule on scientists to prevent them from discussing their studies and data before publication and to impose a uniform requirement that authors assign their intellectual property rights to the journals.

While Professor Uddin’s lawsuit may have resulted in widespread schadenfreude, its factual allegations are dubious. The gag rule, for instance, is often known as the “Ingelfinger Rule” after Franz Ingelfinger, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who introduced the practice in 1969. Ingelfinger’s goal was to ensure originality and reduce redundant publications. Similarly, the practices of not paying authors and peer reviewers, as well as submitting manuscripts to one journal at a time, have long been accepted, well before the rise of rapacious commercial publishing houses.

The potential failure of Professor Uddin’s legal theories does not, however, mean that the plaintiffs have not identified a serious social problem. While the defendants have raised their prices, both for subscriptions and for individual articles, the costs of production have plummeted. Scientific publishing once required labor-intensive, specialized typesetting and expensive artwork for graphs, figures, equations, and tables. Today, the published output is largely generated by computer software, at tremendous savings in labor and costs that are not reflected in market prices. The high costs of acquiring published studies are drains on university budgets and are, in turn, often footed by taxpayers through research grants. The high paywalls not only divert money from scientific research, they diminish public discussion and debate when journalists report new research based upon hyperbolic press releases and abstracts, without ever reading the underlying papers.

Esoteric legal theories may redound to the benefit of the lawsuit industry, but the origins of the crisis in scientific publishing may not be a consequence of collusive behavior. The proliferation of scientists, chasing ever-increasing numbers of research hypotheses under relentless pressure to publish, have no doubt perpetuated many of the ills of scientific publication, with its surfeit of dodgy scientific studies. With the reduced costs of publication, the time may have come for scientific societies to reassert themselves, take control over scientific journals, and push the over-priced commercial publishers out of business.

Nathan Schachtman is a practicing lawyer who has defended against claims of health effects in products-liability litigation for over 40 years.

 



This article was originally published at jamesgmartin.center

Author

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

Add a comment Add a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Post
Coca-cola says it could use more plastic due to Trump tariffs

Coca-cola says it could use more plastic due to Trump tariffs

Next Post
Israel PM says Gaza ceasefire will end if Hamas does not free hostages

Israel PM says Gaza ceasefire will end if Hamas does not free hostages