At Just the News, Greg Piper reports that the editors of the new Journal of the Academy of Public Health are addressing oft-complained-of problems with peer reviewed journals: JAPH offers paid peer review, for example.

Before President Trump nominated them to lead the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, respectively, laid the groundwork for an academic journal on public health that would stand athwart the squelching of scientific dissent and narrative policing endemic to academic publishing around COVID-19.

Now awaiting confirmation, the Stanford and Johns Hopkins medical school professors are handing the reins of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health to their collaborators, including founding editor-in-chief and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who endured social media censorship for his COVID views and firing from Harvard Med for his medical choices.

“Trump nominees, COVID dissenters launch science journal to restore ‘open scientific discourse’,” February 10, 2025

These scientists were targeted as “fringe epidemiologists” due to forbidden doubts about COVID policies (see the Twitter files).

The Academy of Public Health itself is new too, organized under RealClearFoundation.

A Who’s Who of scientists

Although some sources may wish to portray the editors and authors as cranks, Piper notes that “A dozen involved scientists are in the top 1% of their fields by citations, according to the journal”:

The editorial board is a who’s who of scientists who have challenged the COVID magisterium, including Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, co-author of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, and Stanford meta-research pioneer John Ioannidis, one of the first to question the data behind early COVID interventions. “Restore ‘open scientific discourse’”

Many scientists will probably welcome being paid for peer review, which is otherwise seen as “free work” for publications that then charge them high fees to publish their work.

Why Kulldorff thinks we need fresh thinking around journals

Epidemiologist Kulldorff offers a summary of the history of journals at JAPH. Recent years have brought some benefits:

One very positive development from this is the increasing number of open access journals that anyone can read for free, including the public who pay for most medical research through their taxes. Through open access journals and academic archive services, such as arXiv and medRxiv, and thanks to the hard work of open access pioneers such as Ajit Varki, Paul Ginsparg, Peter Suber and Michael Eisen, around half of all biomedical articles are now published under some form of open access model. Since 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required all the research they fund to be open access within one year of publication, and in 2024, NIH director Monica Bertagnolli enhanced this policy by requiring all NIH funded research to be open access immediately upon publication. “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward,” January 20, 2025

But problems that have developed along the way are now entrenched:

The current academic publishing system is slow, and it wastes valuable scientist time that is better spent on research. Great research should be published as soon as possible to promptly advance science. Even excellent and important papers, such as the DANMASK-19 randomized trial, can be rejected three times as the authors try to publish it in as prestigious a journal as possible. This not only delays the dissemination of science. It also requires time-consuming work of many scientists evaluating and reviewing the same article for different journals.

Compared to good research, questionable manuscripts require the effort and time commitment of more reviewers, as they are more likely to get rejected and resubmitted. Even fatally flawed manuscripts are typically accepted by some journal eventually. This gives the research a stamp of approval of being published in a “peer-reviewed journal,” but without readers having access to those earlier critical reviews. Had it been better if those flawed research papers were published by the first journal together with the critical reviews, so that readers could have learned about the problems with the studies?

While we cannot prevent bad science from being published, what is needed is open, robust and lively scientific discourse. That’s the only way to seek scientific truth. “A Way Forward”

Proposals for reform include open access and open, signed peer reviews, as well as payment for the reviewers and reduced “gatekeeping.”

What’s the issue around “gatekeeping?”

Kulldorff explains,

The removal of article gatekeeping can also benefit readers, and especially non-scientists. Now they read a peer-reviewed article not knowing that it had been rejected multiple times by other journals, and without being able to read the reviews that caused the article to be rejected. For readers, it would have been better if the first journal had published the article with the original negative reviews. That is, while seemingly counter intuitive, the removal of article gatekeeping is especially important for weak or questionable research, as long as it goes hand-in-hand with open peer review. “A Way Forward”

Overall, what Kulldorff wants is a more open system. That would give participants a clearer view of the basis for publication decisions. Are papers accepted, even if they are weak, because they enable the journal to curry favor with important people? Are papers rejected, for example, because they are weak — or because they are strong but they advance a currently unpopular view? There is nothing like reading an entire series of correspondence in order to get some sense of that.

Not surprisingly, some researchers don’t like the new journal at all

At Science, we learn from science writer Catherine Offord, that “Skeptics worry the publication will be used to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”

If so, for once it will all be out in the open. Nothing like sunlight.