Frontiers's new blunder: firing editors who disagree with the company's editorial policy

The academic publisher Frontiers has summarily fired a group of editors because of their criticism of the editorial policy of the journals they were editing. Not bad for a company that claims to be a "community oriented"  publisher.

It is not the first time that "Frontiers" appears in the news for a blunder or another. Last year, I gave up with Frontiers on a row over their retraction of a perfectly good paper and, just two months ago, they made another big mistake with a paper dealing with HIV/AIDS. I am more and more convinced that I did the right thing. 

I guess that there is something basically wrong with the idea that a commercial publisher can handle academic papers in the "Open Access" format. For a profit oriented company, the obvious way to go is to maximize the number of papers published,but that is obviously in contrast with the goal of maximizing their quality. 

Open access publishing seemed to be a good idea, at the beginning. It is probably still a good idea, but the way it has been implemented is turning out to be a disaster. 

Here are some documents about Frontiers' latest blunder

From "Science Magazine" (emphasis added)

"Emotions are running high. The editors say Frontiers' publication practices are designed to maximize the company's profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients. Frederick Fenter, executive editor at Frontiers, says the company had no choice but to fire the entire group because they were holding up the publication of papers until their demands were met, which he likens to "extortion."


Read the whole article. 

Here is the abstract of the "Manifesto of Editorial Independence of Editors of Frontiers Medical Journals "

Much to our regret, repeated recent attempts of the medical Editors to discuss crucial issues regarding their position within Frontiers remained unanswered. Therefore Editors of the Frontiers Medical Journals felt urged to write the enclosed Manifesto of Editorial Independence.

The manifesto is submitted to Frontiers Media SA as the publisher and owner of the medical journals Frontiers in Medicine, Frontiers in Surgery, and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and signed by Editors from 14 countries.

The manifesto summarizes the Publisher’s continued interference with our editorial independence, documented transgressions, the unacceptable peer review procedures of medical article manuscripts, and the medical publishing regulations of the WAME, the ICMJE, and the COPE. The publisher is required to respond to the manifesto, to implement changes so that the international medical publishing standards are met, and full editorial independence established and warranted.

And, finally, the start of Frontiers' long rebuttal.

Frontiers today ended the engagement of several Specialty Chief Editors and the Field Chief Editors of Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and Frontiers in Medicine. The Chief Editors wanted Frontiers to change its fundamental principle of distributed editorial decision-making during peer-review and the editors refused communication with Frontiers, some even blocking journal operations, until these demands were met.

Frontiers does it again: how bad practices in science publishing can mislead the public

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 1^st, 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.

(1) http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00154/full

(2) http://rethinkingaids.com/

(3) http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040256

(4) https://www.facebook.com/groups/RethinkingAIDS/

(5) http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2015.00037/full

(6) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10894520

(7) http://retractionwatch.com/2014/09/26/publisher-issues-statement-of-concern-about-hiv-denial-paper-launches-investigation/

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)

Open access science

Far from being an ivory tower, nowadays science looks more like a battered citadel besieged by an army of Orcs.  It doesn't help that scientists don't seem to understand that the public has a right to have access to the results of the research work performed with their tax money. We need to make science more open if we want to be ablet to act on the knowledge that science is producing (image credit "crossbow and catapults")

In the 1990s, when the Internet was young, I had the idea of an "open access journal" in what was my scientific field at the time: surface science. The idea was that scientific research is paid by the public and that, therefore, the results of scientific research have to be freely accessible to the public. So, together with a few colleagues, we started an Internet site called "The Surface Science Forum" which made research papers in surface science freely available on the Web.


It was not a success. The "Surface science forum" survived for a few years, but it never had a real impact. In 2000, I was moving to a different field and I decided to close the forum. If you are curious, you can still find it here.

But the problems with scientific publishing that the Surface Science Forum had tried to address are still there and, with time, are becoming more and more serious. Not long ago, George Monbiot gave a good description of these problems in an article on "The Guardian" He says:

Distrust [in science] has been multiplied by the publishers of scientific journals, whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels, and which are long overdue for a referral to the Competition Commission. They pay nothing for most of the material they publish, yet, unless you are attached to an academic institute, they'll charge you £20 or more for access to a single article. In some cases they charge libraries tens of thousands for an annual subscription. If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.


What Monbiot says is true: in giving the results of their work to publishers for free, scientists are exploited as if they were seasonal fruit pickers. Of course, there would be nothing wrong in this practice if the money paid for accessing scientific papers were to go to finance research or to pay for services useful for research. But that's not the case. Commercial publishers don't finance research and they face very modest costs for their activity. Peer reviewing, for instance, is performed by scientists for free (again!).

Scientists are not supposed to be dumb and, normally, they aren't. This behavior of theirs is the result of a specific factor: the fact that scientific papers are a sort of "currency" in the world of science. Money, as well known, is nothing but credit and, for scientists, each paper is a form of credit that can be later redeemed in terms of career advancement, grants, academic positions and the like. It is "money", in short.

Scientific publishers have managed to act as "banks" for this scientific currency. As banks, they guarantee the value of the currency they manage; actually they create it in the form of published papers that they stamp with their seal of quality, just as Roman Emperors stamped their denarius coins with their face.

So, it is understandable that scientists don't want to see their currency debased. For them, publishing outside the system is the equivalent of printing counterfeited money. It is not only valueless, it may actually have a negative value, damaging the scientist's reputation. for instance, in some quarters, keeping a blog is considered as a blot on a scientist's reputation. That was the attitude that had doomed the "Surface Science Forum" and which is still the prevalent one in science.


But times are rapidly changing. Once, science might have been seen as an ivory tower, able to keep its own currency.  Now, it looks more and more like a battered citadel besieged by an army of orcs with catapults. The situation is especially bad with climate science, object of political spin campaigns designed to destroy the reputation of individual scientists as well as of the whole field. The public tends to ask science for miracle solutions to our problems and people are disappointed when told that there is none. Disappointed people tend to become aggressive, as you can see, as an example, in some comments on the recent case of the E-Cat scam. In this situation, the traditional methods of scientific publishing are not going to enhance the prestige of science.

Fortunately, scientists seem to be discovering that they can't stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn't reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in "open access journals", which just didn't exist up to not long ago. There is now an "open science movement", and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.

Is all that enough? Surely, these are positive developments, but we must do more. Science is not an ivory tower and not even a besieged citadel. It is an enterprise designed to produce knowledge and we badly need this knowledge in this difficult moment. It is not enough to make this knowledge available to those who paid for it, we must also strive to make it understandable to those who can act on it. How to do it? Well, there are many ways. For a start, if you are a scientist, why don't you keep a blog?


On the question of open access, see also this article on the New York Times (h/t Bart Anderson)