The publishers of "Frontiers" provide readers with a remarkable pitch for their activities that includes the lavish use of terms such as "grassroots", "community oriented" "empowering researchers," and the like. Unfortunately, reality is far from these fantasies. "Frontiers" is not a grassroots initiative, but a profit oriented, commercial publishing house, and scientists have no control on what they decide to publish or not to publish.
I described in a previous post how the science publisher "Frontiers" took down a perfectly legitimate paper in climate science on the basis of unscientific criticism they received - a story that led me to resign from the position of chief scientific editor I had with them. Now, they did it again, although in reverse: they refused to take down an unscientific paper about AIDS on the basis of perfectly legitimate scientific criticism they received about it. What they did was, instead, to demote it to an "opinion" paper. That only made the problem worse.
Let me state it clearly: the business of a science publisher is to publish peer reviewed scientific papers. Opinion pieces can find space in scientific journals only when dealing with issues that can't be solved with the standard scientific method; say, about science policy. But it is totally wrong for a science publisher to publish bad scientific papers under the label of "opinion pieces." For that, we have plenty of tabloids that can do the job.
What Frontiers did is not just a minor mishap: publishing bad science about serious issues such as AIDS is dangerous as the treatment of AIDS is an issue of life and death for many people. Unfortunately, however, the diffusion of "open access" journals managed by scientifically incompetent editors is leading to a proliferation of bad science. And this bad science appears, at first sight, as legitimate, "peer reviewed" articles that can badly mislead the public.
This is a problem deeply ingrained with scientists having delegated the dissemination of their result to commercial publishers. In principle, there is nothing wrong with publishing as a commercial enterprise but it is turning out that scientists have no real control on what these publishers (even supposedly "serious" ones) publish or do not publish. The case of Frontiers shows this point very clearly. So, the only possibility we have - as scientists - to contrast this trend is to avoid submitting our work to publishers who clearly show little or no understanding of the basic elements of what science publishing should be.
In the following, you can find the responses of a group of Italian scientists to the paper on AIDS that Frontiers published.
___________________________________________
Texts kindly provided by "Dora"
Last September,
Frontiers in Public Health published an AIDS denialist paper by Patricia
Goodson, a psychologist who teaches Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M
University. Following the immediate reaction of the scientific community,
the publisher Frontiers launched an investigation to look into the
peer review process and to understand how the paper came to be published.
During this
investigation Frontiers “has sought expert input from the Specialty Chief
Editors of the HIV and AIDS section of Frontiers in Public Health and
Frontiers in Immunology”, which led to a conclusion that ended up turning
what could be a simple, however serious, oversight of peer reviewers and chief
editors into a debacle of the journal: Dr Goodson’s article has been re-classified as an “opinion” piece,
“which represents the viewpoint of an individual”.
So the paper continues to be
indexed on PubMed and can easily be used by the AIDS denialist movement for its
propaganda in social networks and among lay people with HIV or who are at risk.
Used in this way, the paper's re-designation as an "opinion" article rather than
a "research" one is purely academic.
Johns Hopkins
biologist Kenneth Witwer has called on scientists to boycott the publisher in
response.
With a group of friends at the
Italian HIVforum and with the support of four Italian scientists, I’ve sent a
letter of complaint to Frontiers’ editors. The Frontiers Editorial Office
Manager replied acknowledging receipt and promising a more comprehensive
response “in a few days”. It's now been two weeks and there’s no trace of that
“more comprehensive response”.
This is our complaint letter to Frontiers.
Dora – On behalf
of the HIVforum Group (dora@hivforum.info)
March
1st,
2015
To
Frontiers
in Public Health
Frontiers
EPFL
Innovation Park, Building I
CH
– 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
HIV/AIDS Chief
Editors
Nina Bhardwaj, New York University School of Medicine Langone Medical Center, New York, USA
John B.F. de Wit, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Frank Miedema, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
CC to
Kamila Makram, CEO of Frontiers
Editorial Office of Frontiers
As PLWHAs,
scientists, clinicians and activists we are dismayed at the decision
of Frontiers in Public Health to publish an article whose sole
purpose is to promote HIV/AIDS denialism: Questioning
the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent.
(1)
The individuals who
developed this piece are associated with a well-known internet based
group (2)
whose ideological purpose is to convince people with HIV/AIDS, and
those who are at risk, that the virus does not exist or is harmless,
that their diagnosis is a fraud, that HIV/AIDS is not sexually
transmissible, and that competent treatment of the disease including
the prevention of mother to child transmission is a cruel hoax
perpetrated by greedy and foolish doctors, the pharmaceutical
industry, governments, and gay activists.
It is difficult to
understand how in 2015 a professional journal focused on public
health could willingly lend support such a perverse project.
As a work of supposed scholarship, the paper is of manifestly poor quality. Likewise, its call to public health practitioners to take seriously such claims and to engage with them in informed debate is disingenuous: such “debates” have been carried on ad nauseam for decades, and serve only as a tactic to generate sound and fury in order to try to convince the denialists’ target audience that there is genuine uncertainty in the scientific and medical communities about whether HIV exists or causes any human disease. (3) Attempting to engage denialists is pointless: they have demonstrated conclusively over the past 30 years that they are impervious to evidence based counterargument, and will simply repeat the same claims over and over despite repeated refutation and painstaking explanation. Invariably such “debates” degenerate into personal attacks, and on a number of occasions to lawsuits.
Clearly, no one familiar with the basic science could take any of this paper’s contentions seriously, but its purpose is not to convince competent scientists or clinicians. Its purpose is to try to lend a veneer of credibility to their argument, when they target their main audience in social media. (4)
Dr. Goodson’s opening argument that “according to established immunology principles” the detection of antibodies necessarily demonstrates a past resolved infection and not a present one will be recognized as nonsense by anyone with basic science literacy, but is calculated to provide false reassurance to people with HIV who are struggling with their diagnosis.
She concludes her argument by blithely dismissing at a stroke the vast epidemiological literature demonstrating the causal relationship between HIV infection and AIDS with the statement that “epidemiological data do not provide evidence for causation”. It beggars belief that someone who teaches public health in a US institution could so profoundly misstate the fundamentals of her field, or that such a statement could pass unremarked on in a public health journal.
In between, she recites a familiar litany of tired falsehoods, misrepresentations and misapprehensions designed to mislead her intended audience into ignoring and dismissing measures to prevent, diagnose and treat a serious infectious disease. Dr. Goodson asserts, for example, that an HIV-1 Western Blot with bands at gp41, p32, and p24 is read as “negative” in Africa and Australia, which is patently false. Citing no less an authority than Dr. Henry Bauer himself she claims that HIV-1 p24 and gp41 are “found in blood platelets of healthy individuals.” which is again untrue. She states that “a retrovirus is nothing more than RNA with an outer protein shell” which “enables it to bind to cells of the type it infects”, ignoring the lipid bilayer envelope and other key components of lentiviruses.
She states incorrectly, that antiretroviral drugs “destroy the immune systems’ healthy T-cells”, and “cause a collapse identical to AIDS”, and that the apparent “miraculous recovery” observed by patients with AIDS using them is nothing more than a temporary illusion created by their broad spectrum antimicrobial effects.
There is nothing in Dr Goodson’s paper that warrants informed debate, nor any insight that could possibly contribute positively to public health.
We cannot understand how such obvious untruths and misrepresentations were able to pass through the filter first of the peer review and later of an investigation which has “sought expert input from the Specialty Chief Editors of the HIV and AIDS section of Frontiers in Public Health and Frontiers in Immunology”. (5)
Open access publishing is not merely a discourse among scholars but its very accessibility intersects with that of lay social media where it can be open to abuse by interests that seek to borrow the reputation of peer reviewed journals to further agendas inimical to public interest: this creates an enhanced obligation on publishers to be mindful of potential audiences and to avoid causing harm to readers who might lack the background knowledge and skills to evaluate contentious and clearly counterfactual claims, especially where such deliberate misinformation might lead individuals to make poor health decisions.
While it may have been the intention of the publisher that such claims might be conclusively dealt with by open debate on their pages, in reality this has not been possible in the case of HIV/AIDS denialism for many years, if ever. Such "debates" are futile because denialists by their nature are not amenable to reason or evidence, and in reality there is no dispute among informed scientists and clinicians about whether HIV exists and causes disease. (6)
Frontiers' publisher
has possibly misinterpreted the lack of public engagement with Dr
Goodson's absurd paper as approval of, or at least indifference to,
its publication. In fact many of us have trusted the good sense of
Frontiers' editors to take appropriate action for such a bizarre
submission with obvious adverse implications for public health, and
did not wish to add unnecessarily to the publisher’s further
humiliation by contentious public criticism in the comments.
Unfortunately our trust in the judgment of Frontiers' senior editors appears to have been misplaced. The decision to demote the paper to “Opinion Article” will make no difference to the intended lay audience who will see only that Goodson’s claims are published in a peer reviewed journal of some repute, and are therefore credible.
The original publication of the paper was an embarrassing error which has highlighted to readers and potential contributors a significant deficit in the journal’s editorial oversight. In its Statement of Concern, the publisher has promised to make public the outcome of its investigation into how this paper came to appear in its journal. (7) To date this has not occurred.
The decision by Frontiers’ senior editors to support continued publication despite being made aware of the likely public health consequences of such a decision is incomprehensible, and appears to demonstrate indifference to, or a lack of understanding of, the journal’s responsibilities to its readers, contributors and to the wider community.
Dora – On behalf
of the HIVforum Group (dora@hivforum.info)
Guido
Poli, AIDS Immunopathogenesis Unit, San Raffaele Scientific
Institute and Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milano, Italy
(poli.guido@hsr.it)
Guido
Silvestri, Emory University School of Medicine, Emory University,
Atlanta, GA, USA (gsilves@emory.edu)
Andrea
Savarino, Istituto Superiore di Sanità , Rome, Italy
(andrea.savarino@iss.it)
Giovanni
Maga, Institute of Molecular Genetics IGM-CNR National Research
Council, Pavia, Italy (maga@igm.cnr.it)
