Studies censored by government employees will have a tough time getting published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), the journal’s leadership said during an interview with MedPage Today‘s editor in chief.
“We at the American Journal of Public Health have no interest in following the president’s prohibitions on language,” said Georges Benjamin, MD, publisher of AJPH and executive director of its parent organization, the American Public Health Association.
“We will publish things under our guidelines, under our ethical principles,” Benjamin told Jeremy Faust, MD, acknowledging that may mean that federal government employees — and perhaps even private-sector researchers with federal grants — won’t submit to them.
Benjamin made the statements to Faust during a Tuesday Instagram Live (at about 28 minutes into the video) hosted by MedPage Today titled, “Public Health Under Attack,” focusing on the impact of a recent spate of executive orders that have put science and medicine in the crosshairs. They come after Faust reported that the CDC instructed its scientists to withdraw or pause the publication of any manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal to ensure no “forbidden terms” — largely related to gender equity — appear in the work.
Benjamin explained that during the peer review process, AJPH reviewers will ask standard questions such as, “‘Is this word better than that word?’ and ‘Why didn’t you include this population in your study?'”
He added that he and Alfredo Morabia, MD, PhD, the editor in chief of AJPH, “have a single mind here. … If someone sends us material that has not been censored, we will publish it. If they send us material that has been censored, it will be evaluated by peer review like anybody else, and if it still meets our standards, we will publish it.”
“People are going to self-censor because they always do, and that’s the real challenge here,” Benjamin said. “We’ll just have to figure out how to navigate that.”
He added it’s not unusual for editors and researchers to go head-to-head over language and text references. “It’s a collaborative process to publish something, and they can choose not to. That’s fine.”
When Faust said the concern would be potentially not hearing from CDC scientists, Benjamin noted that publications “will go through a kind of underground. Their names will get pulled and someone else will publish it.”
That means some researchers won’t get the credit that’s due them, but Benjamin said it’s more about academic progress in general.
“For me, the problem is that people are afraid,” Benjamin said. “We’ve got people afraid to talk about [how their] money’s not coming through. We’ve got people afraid to talk about what they’re publishing. We’ve got people who want to sign on letters of protest but who are afraid for their jobs, afraid for their very safety.”
“That needs to end,” he said. “That should not happen in America.”
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