The Controversy of Research Censorship and Preprints

Written by Martha Rosenberg on February 10, 2023. Posted in Current News

Long delays in peer review and potential biases at journals are driving researchers to take an unorthodox publishing route

Long before COVID-19, academics squabbled about the methodology, clinical sample sizes, and data manipulation of published scientific papers—especially if they did not agree with conclusions or were educational rivals.

Since the medical journal publication process—especially peer review are so slow—the latter taking longer than a year at some journals—many researchers have turned to preprint servers.

Intended to allow scientific studies to achieve dissemination before long waits for publication, the oldest preprint server began 30 years ago and now there are scores of them. Preprint servers can also be seen as part of the “open access” movement in which scientific findings are available to all and not hidden behind a paywall.

Preprint servers became particularly important and contentious during the COVID-19 pandemic when an urgent need for therapeutics amid a politically charged environment turned treatments as benign as vitamin D into major controversies.

Problems With Peer Review

What is peer review? Independent reviewers who are knowledgeable in a related field, sometimes called referees, are chosen by a journal’s editor, to assess a submitted manuscript for originality, validity, and significance.

These reviewers are typically employed at universities and institutions that task professors and researchers with doing peer reviews as part of their responsibilities. In other words, reviewers are not typically paid by the journal. Being a reviewer is a boost to a researcher or expert’s professional credibility—and by extension that of their employer.

Peer review is the “gold standard” for scientific papers and its absence is a key feature of arguments against preprint publications. Yet the potential flaws in peer review are also well recognized.

According to the Lancet, one of the top medical journals, the peer review system is costly, time-consuming, and favors reviewers from “high-income countries” rather than low-income countries because the latter may not be able to afford to do the uncompensated review work.

More significant than that issue is likely the influence of status-quo reviewers who have careers built on specific theories or paradigms. Evidence that challenges or overturns established ideas can directly undermine a reviewer’s professional credibility.

According to an opinion piece in the BMJ, another top medical journal, prevailing medical beliefs can be reinforced by peer review when “an editor or reviewer has a strong view for or against an author’s findings” resulting in bias.

Also, according to the opinion writer “[m]any studies have also documented higher acceptance rates for manuscripts written by authors from English-speaking countries, contributing to the publication gap between high-income and lower-income and middle-income countries.”

A study published by Cambridge University Press also observed the potential for bias and that “Heterogeneous reviewer and reader standards for scientific quality” tilt the results of what is published toward conformity.

Scientists need “to begin asking whether our judgments are truly consistent with our scholarly and scientific standards, particularly when evidence suggests that underrepresented groups in the discipline are systematically disadvantaged by how we think about the journal hierarchy,” wrote the author.

Peer Review Errors Can Happen

The Cambridge piece included another caveat—“peer review also frequently misses major errors in submitted papers.”

Such errors go back at least to the revered JAMA when, in 2006, an article defending antidepressants during pregnancy was found to have ties to antidepressant manufacturers and authors of an article linking migraines with auras to cardiovascular disease was found to be financially linked to migraine and heart medication manufacturers.

Dr. Scott Reuben, a professor at Tufts University in Boston who received his medical degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in 1985, faked data in 21 studies according to the Scientific American in 2009 and 10 of his papers were published by the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.

He ended up going to jail and the papers were retracted.

Hormone maker Wyeth (later becoming Pfizer) published a plethora of pro-hormone replacement therapy (HRT) papers in medical journals that were found to be written by marketing ghostwriters.

Some of the pro-HRT papers still stand such as, “Is there an association between hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer?” (Guess what the answer was?) “The role of hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease,” and “Mild cognitive impairment: Potential pharmacological treatment options.”

The industry-driven papers occluded the truth about HRT—the Women’s Health Initiative found it increased the risk of breast cancer in women by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent, and doubled the risk of blood clots, though recent research has thrown some of these findings into question as hormone therapies continue to evolve.

A New Focus on Preprints

Preprints allow authors to reach an audience more quickly, without peer review, and thus can be more “democratic.” However, during COVID-19, those very attributes have sometimes made preprints the “bad guys.”

According to Maximilian Heimstädt, a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, in a post on the London School of Economics and Political Science’s blog, “The rise of open access has shifted power away from academic experts, as peer-reviewed studies became easily accessible to civil society, journalists, think tanks, charities, etc. … preprints could lead to a further democratization of expert authority, encouraging forms of ‘lay expertise.’ Inevitably, this runs the risk of fake news and bad faith actors.”

An article published in the journal Nature that the top preprint server sites for COVID-19 information—bioRxiv and medRxiv—are tightening their exclusion data because of disinformation fears.

“[M]anuscripts are examined by volunteer academics or subject specialists who scan for non-scientific content and health or biosecurity risks,” says the article. Richard Sever, a cofounder of both servers told Nature that the vetting process first seeks out articles that “might cause harm” rather than evaluating quality.

The vetting includes “flagging papers that might contradict widely accepted public-health advice or inappropriately use causal language in reporting on a medical treatment,” says the Nature article, and rejecting “papers that might fuel conspiracy theories.”

Of course, sometimes radically divergent science can be mislabelled because it is particularly groundbreaking. Many will remember that the “germ theory,” proven by French chemist Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, also contradicted widely accepted public-health advice.

Meanwhile, journals themselves have been deluged with COVID-19 papers and have had to speed up their acceptance processes according to Nature. That in itself can lead to a reduced ability to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to quality science.

Is the Public Served By Such Tightened Publication Criteria?

The lack of experts reviewing preprint papers can raise questions about the quality of their papers, but those attacking this publication process may incidentally support scientific elitism and even censorship.

Albert-László Barabási, a computational scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, had another observation when his paper was rejected by the preprint site bioRxiv because the site was no longer accepting manuscripts forecasting COVID-19 predictions about treatments on the basis of computational work.

Barabási said he understood the concerns about protecting patient safety but added, “It’s precisely the coronavirus that creates an environment where you need to share,” such breaking information, he said. The purpose of a preprint server, “is that we decide what is interesting, not the referees,” he added.

Many readers would agree with Barabási, especially during a worldwide viral pandemic. A diversity of medical viewpoints should be desirable especially when a closed medical establishment seems heavily tilted toward vested interests.

It is also true that junk science can further confuse public opinion. But that point seems less pertinent when public distrust appears heightened, rather than reduced, by efforts to enforce scientific hegemony.

See more here theepochtimes.com

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