Earlier this month, interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Edward R. Martin Jr. sent an official DOJ letter to the editor-in-chief of CHEST Journal Peter Mazzone with a number of questions about that periodical’s editorial processes. The questions were aimed at ascertaining the publishing procedures, given that, according to Martin, CHEST Journal had allegedly conceded that they were “partisan in various scientific debates.” Similar letters were sent to at least two other journal editors, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to NBC.

Martin’s questions are seemingly interested in promoting pathways to publication for what he calls “competing viewpoints” in a time when science on a number of topics—and responses to that science—are increasingly being coded as partisan. For example, in the letter, Martin asks if the publications for which Mazzone works are “adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints” and whether he “accepts articles or essays from competing viewpoints.”

The Trump administration has yet to comment on why these letters are being sent out, how many journals have been contacted, and the intended goal. Scientists and editors are however sounding the alarm that such actions are a threat to free speech and editorial independence more generally.

But Martin’s probing on whether “competing viewpoints” are being adequately published in CHEST Journal or other science journals—while inappropriate as questions from the government—does raise a question worth asking about academic publishing:

How do we ensure that journals are truly open to a wide variety of expert inquiry on the topics on which they publish? Or, as Jonathan Haidt asked when he founded HxA, “Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?”

Viewpoint diversity, broadly construed, is important in scientific research, especially when the topics of study are vulnerable to politicization. As Musa al-Ghabari eloquently notes, “Science is a team sport…In contexts where researchers approach questions with different sets of knowledge and experiences, different material and ideal interests, using different methods, and drawing on different theoretical frameworks and value systems, we can produce something together over time that approaches objective, reliable, comprehensive knowledge.”

One approach to expanding viewpoint diversity in the scientific literature has been to create new journals explicitly for viewpoints not represented in the broader literature or those too heretical to make it past the mainstream journal editor’s desk. For example, the Journal of Controversial Ideas was created in 2021 “to promote free inquiry on controversial topics” and to offer scholars an academic outlet for scholarship that “might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive.”

It is no secret that academic publishing has legitimate issues (as I've written about previously here and here), including the sustaining of biases that influence what articles are published. And scholars have rightly argued that ideological biases have kept legitimate ideas out of the official scientific discussion. The establishment of new journals with the goal of publishing the viewpoints that are more likely to be kept out of the literature (or retracted on ideological grounds later) is a noble goal.

Yet treating “contested viewpoints” or research that reaches unorthodox conclusions differently or relegating them to an “other” place is not the best way to set the standard of open inquiry in science. Research supporting “contested viewpoints” should not be held to a different or lower standard as implied by Martin’s question about “adjusting” the method of acceptance for such views.

Nor should journals subject viewpoints that counter prevailing political narratives to harsher standards as in Nature’s highly contested editorial policy that requires additional methodological practices, “inclusive, respectful, non-stigmatizing” language, and reporting requirements for research on topics such as race and gender that have the potential to be misaligned with the journal’s predetermined views of these topics.

Instead our journals should publish the best scholarship as determined by better scientific methods—not imposing viewpoint quotas in the literature or treating research differently based on viewpoint. And there are already promising new approaches to publishing that are designed to improve the accuracy of the scientific answers we get—whatever they turn out to be, and whichever political position they may be coded as aligning with.

Rather than deciding whether a study is deserving of publication after results are known—the standard way for more than a century in modern science—the Center for Open Science has pioneered registered reports for publishing. In this system, scientists have to sign their name to their hypothesis, methods, and reasoning before they collect data and run the numbers. In the most strict cases, journals can accept a manuscript before the study has been run and the results are even known, ensuring that the merit of the research methods is what is driving the peer-review decisions without being influenced by the valence of the results.

Another approach pioneered by HxA member and Penn visiting scholar Cory Clark directly pits competing viewpoints in research against each other in the form of “adversarial collaborations.” The project’s website explains that “the results of these adversarial collaborations have potential to minimize ambiguity in the literature because disagreeing scholars jointly publish results, forwarding one clearer (if more moderate and nuanced) state of the art, which helps other scientists have more accurate beliefs about empirical reality.”

The official scientific literature should be truly open to all methodologically rigorous scholarship. When we close the gates to certain ideas or relegate them to different spaces, we risk bias in the literature that can inhibit truth in the quest for knowledge.

What’s important to note is that all of the new approaches discussed here—new journals, open science, and adversarial collaborations—are all reforms from within by academics who see problems and collectively solve them as experts. What these are not are governmental interventions by non-experts to impose viewpoints in scientific publishing. Reform can happen from within, and the result in this case is better science and more accurate knowledge.

This post was amended on April 28 to correct Martin’s title.