Science Journals

omfg target 4 25 rfk ed fucking martin

includes medical jrnls // NIH/CDC

see sci suppression ed fucking martin

SEE EXPERTISE

note:

sci am outsourced its blog feed to a little co in escondido that fooled one of my students on climate denial

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AN 10 26

A recent study says Americans’ support for political violence fell in 2026, but MAGA supporters remain the most likely to justify it.

PsyPost covered the research, which was published as a preprint on SocArXiv and not yet peer-reviewed. But early nationally surveys suggests that American public support for political violence decreased heading into the 2026 midterm elections, contrary to popular fears.

“The findings indicate that while partisan tensions remain high, about three-quarters of U.S. adults say political violence is never justified in general, and very few say they would be willing to commit it,” reports Psypost.

But those numbers do not necessarily hold true for the MAGA political enclave, say researchers.

When researchers examined differences among political groups, they found that MAGA Republicans and MAGA supporters who do not identify as Republicans tended to report higher levels of justification for political violence compared to Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans.

“For instance, 50.5 percent of MAGA Republicans and 52.5 percent of non-Republican MAGA supporters considered violence usually or always justified to advance at least one objective, compared with 35.8 percent overall,” reported Psypost. “… Among respondents who considered violence justified, non-Republican MAGA supporters were more willing than others to commit violence against 12 of 14 target populations.”

These numbers ranked second behind strong Democrats, who were slightly more prone to justify violence against private armed militias and federal immigration agents.

“Declines in support occurred across the political spectrum overall, though changes within individual groups were mostly small,” Psypost reported. “MAGA Republicans moved slightly in the other direction on several items about the potential need for violence and civil war.”

“We found, as others have, that support for political violence is generally stronger on the political right than on the political left,” said research leader Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California.

This dynamic mirrors the team’s earlier findings, reports PsyPost, pointing out that in a separate study recently published in *PLOS One*, the researchers analyzed baseline data collected from the same survey project in 2022 and found that Republicans and conservatives were much more likely than Democrats and liberals to view political violence as justified for specific objectives.

But most respondents reject political violence in general, Wintemute added, saying the “willingness to commit political violence … is rare across the board.”

“The vast majority of respondents in our surveys reject political violence altogether, and most of those who consider it acceptable are not willing to become involved in it themselves,” he explained.

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an 4 25

...

{Targeting Medical Journals}:}:

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

ref1

no lnx nyt

Edward Martin wears a gray suit and blue tie as he speaks at a desk with a microphone at the Capitol.

Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent letters to science and medical journals, accusing them of bias.Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press

Teddy RosenbluthRebecca Robbins

By Teddy Rosenbluth and Rebecca Robbins

April 18, 2025

A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.

The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.

Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.

One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.

The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.

In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”

He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”

And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”

The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.

It was not clear how many journals had been targeted. Several prominent medical and science publishers said they had not received letters. Others declined requests for comment. News of the letters was earlier reported by MedPage Today, a medical news website.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington also declined to comment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy had any involvement.

Laura DiMasi, a spokeswoman for the American College of Chest Physicians, confirmed that the organization had received the letter but declined an interview request.

Most of what medical journals publish is highly technical, aimed at an audience of specialists. But they and the organizations that publish them have increasingly come under attack. Right-leaning sites like Breitbart have derided them as “woke medical journals.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, has been attacking the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which publishes a journal and runs a variety of reproductive health programs. It has received federal funding for an effort to promote maternal health. The alliance recently urged the Trump administration to cut funding and investigate the group, saying it was pushing liberal ideas about diversity and gender.

Several journals or their publishers have publicly opposed Mr. Trump.

In January, the American Public Health Association, which publishes a journal, was among several groups that sued the Trump administration over a memo freezing federal funding. That policy that has now been rescinded, though the administration has since halted other funds.

In March, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called mass layoffs at H.H.S. an “attack on public health.”

In 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic — the first time the journal had taken a position in an election in its 208-year history. The journal Nature endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in the 2020 election and spoke out against a second Trump term during the 2024 election.

Medical journals are afforded the same First Amendment protections as any other news media outlet.

Kent Anderson, a consultant for scientific publishers who has written about conservative attacks on medical journals, said that Mr. Martin’s inquiry could have a chilling effect among publishers.

“This is a fishing expedition from a U.S. attorney, and that makes people nervous,” Mr. Anderson said. “It may make them think twice about an editorial about treating women who have a spontaneous abortion or about transgender teens dealing with a health issue, because it may make them think that somebody is going to knock on the door.”

Mr. Kennedy had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)

He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.

“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”

As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.

Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”

Before becoming director of the N.I.H., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly chastised the editor in chief of a prominent journal, Science, claiming he had “publicly denigrated scientists” who opposed Covid-era lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya was widely denounced by mainstream scientists during the pandemic for proposing that the virus should allowed to spread naturally through the population.

Dr. Bhattacharya also co-founded a new journal pitched as an alternative to traditional scientific publishing. It has published contrarian views on Covid.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

Rebecca Robbins is a reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services Department, Donald Trump

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THE jrnl science 4/15/19 DN supports student strikes?

===

B&S hack / punk german jrnl

RS june 07

To direct the White House's spin on global warming, Connaughton appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right

experience for the job: He worked as "climate team leader" for the

American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an

industry coalition that created the "Global Climate Science

Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into evidence by the House Oversight Committee,

maps out an elaborate disinformation campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate

change." The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming,

disseminating industry-funded research to challenge "the science

underpinning the global climate change theory."

Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-

climate man running the disinformation campaign.As the "action plan"

directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA's science on global

warming and inject the industry's denialist positions into government

documents."They decided they didn't need to win the debate on

climate," says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney's

tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about

it and dissipate the will for political action."

But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a

rough start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate

Action Report, a dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on

climate-treaty obligations. The report was developed by the EPA, but

internal documents reveal thatCooney edited it to reflect positions

advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening page of the chapter on climate impacts,

Cooney inserted a litany of language in bold

intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our

knowledge . . . a lack of understanding . . . uncertainties . . .

considerable uncertainty . . . perhaps even greater uncertainty . . .

regarded as tentative."

But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real

science. With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered

out Cooney's waffling and filed a front-page story that called the

report "a stark shift for the Bush administration. " The report, the

Times observed, detailed "far-reaching effects that global warming

will inflict" and "for the first time mostly blames human actions for

recent global warming."

Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to

whitewash now threatened to undermine his former employers in the

energy industry. Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron

Ebell had been a key member of the coalition that crafted the

disinformation "action plan." In fact, casting doubt on global

warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the climate-denial

campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that

was underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.

Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the

Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him.

"We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd

add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really

happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a

total mess of it."

Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd,

"Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode. . . . I want to help you cool things down, but after

consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration

repudiating the report."

That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the

bureaucracy. " Forget the headlines, he said - there was no shift in the administration' s policy.

What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals just how seriously the White House took its

intelligence fixing on global warming. Cooney was put in charge of damage control and was apparently instructed to craft a letter to the

Times denying that the president had changed course on climate

change.But this time, Cooney's editor was not just Connaughton, but

Bush's chief political adviser,Karl Rove. The collaboration with

Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last

March, in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed

with Rove his work at the CEQ.

The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the

Climate Action Report"reinforces" the "significant scientific uncertainties" emphasized in the president's climate policy. Edits to

the rough drafts of the letter were blacked out by White House

censors, but Rove's pithy endorsement of the final draft

survived. "Great," he wrote in praise of Cooney's spin. "Defends the

report rather than staying focused on the policy." In other words, Cooney had succeeded in emphasizing the report's overhyped

uncertainties, thus shifting attention away from the White House's do- nothing approach to global warming.

Page 6

At the same time, Cooney got a pat on the back from Bill O'Keefe, his

old boss at API. In a letter to Bush's chief of staff, O'Keefe - by

that point a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil - urged the president

to tighten up the White House spin machine and make sure all

communications were "on the same page, with the same message."

O'Keefe also faxed a copy to Cooney with a handwritten note

reading, "P.S. You are doing a great job."

From then on, Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official

reports on global warming. Not content to obscure science with

uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself. Draft documents

made public by the House Oversight Committee reveal that Cooney now had veto power over federal scientists, including Richard Moss,

coordinator of the Climate Change Science Program Office, and even

James Mahoney, the assistant commerce secretary nominally in charge

of America's climate science.

In one document, Moss and Mahoney attempted to push back on several

of Cooney's more than 100 edits to an EPA document called "Our

Changing Planet" - each of which served to amplify uncertainty and

downplay the threat posed by global warming. Cooney repeatedly

overruled Moss and Mahoney with an aggressive "no" scrawled in the

margins. On another document Cooney marked up, he commanded

EPA officials that "these changes must be made." Beside one strike-

through marked with a star, Cooney wrote, "Red Flag: Do not cite

National Assessment" - dismissing the landmark report commissioned by Bush's father.

Although some of Cooney's edits were revealed in a New York Times

story in June 2005 that led to his departure, the full extent of his

interference has never been reported. His commissarial coup came in

April 2003, with his revisions to the EPA's Draft Report on the

Environment. He began by deleting the sentence "climate change has

global consequences for human health and the environment. "He then

deleted the top-line assessment by the National Research Council,

which establishes an unequivocal cause-and-effect link - "Greenhouse

gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of human

activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean

temperatures to rise." In its place, Cooney wrote the following

mishmash of his own creation: "Some activities emit greenhouse gases

and other substances that directly or indirectly may affect the

balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby potentially

affecting climate on regional and global scales."

The changes sparked a rebellion by the EPA's senior scientists. In an

internal memo uncovered by Congressional investigators, they wrote

that Cooney's edited text "no longer accurately represents scientific

consensus on climate change" and "may leave an impression that

cooling is as much an issue as warming." Whitman was also

furious. "The language that CEQ found acceptable was such pablum,"

she says now. "It was so much below the level of sophistication of

the report that I felt it would have denigrated it all." But her

solution to this problem was to simply delete the section on climate

change - handing Cooney a carte-blanche victory.

Whitman says she killed the section hoping that scientific documents

included with the report would speak for themselves.But the

capitulation helped drive her to the breaking point. Four days after

bowing to Cooney, she resigned as head of the EPA.

Internal documents uncovered by Rolling Stone reveal that Cooney did

far more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration' s

point of view. Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled

false intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president,

Cooney steered industry-sponsored junk science on global warming to Cheney.

"What disturbed me most," Whitman says, "was the administration' s record of taking the most extreme of the science -

what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight as the real science."

The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study

underwritten in part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study,

which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually

warm, was authored by two astrophysicists, [gotta be Soon and Baliunas:

Baliunas has co-published numerous scientific papers with fellow climate change skeptic Willie Soon including a controversial paper in 2003 that suggested the climate hasn't changed in the last 2000 years. Several members of the Climate Research journal resigned in protest to the flawed peer-review process allowing Baliunas's paper to be published. desmog ]

both of whom were on the payroll of the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-denial group

funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill O'Keefe, Cooney's former

boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal in January

2003quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three

other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper

was fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.

"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's

almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the

administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."

But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great

excitement in the White House. When Kathie Olsen of the Office of

Science and Technology Policy forwarded the study to Cooney, he

responded with an enthusiastic, "Thanks, Kathie!" Six minutes later,

according to internal e-mails, the study was in the hands of Kevin

O'Donovan, who served as Cheney's point man on climate. The study

also grabbed President Bush's attention, as revealed in an e-mail

sent two days later to a high-ranking White House official: "Bob - if

you din't [sic] already have, this is the study the President was

talking about."

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/18/climate-denial-co2-coalition-trump-morner-funding-sea-level-research-dodgy-journals

A climate science denial group with links to President Trump’s administration has been funding work to sow doubt that low-lying islands in the Pacific are at risk from rising sea levels.

The two researchers being funded — one of which is a well-known climate science denier — have targeted little known “open access” journals with dubious quality controls to get their work published, DeSmog has found.

The CO2 Coalition funded the work and in March 2017 sent well-known climate science denier Nils-Axel Mörner to Fiji with Pamela Matlack-Klein, who has described herselfas having a degree from the “Oceanographic Center of Nova Southeastern University, Dania, Florida, in 1983” and writes a weekly newspaper column.

Trump Admin Links to the CO2 Coalition

Among the CO2 Coalition’s members is Kathleen Hartnett White — an energy and environment fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who is Trump’s nominee to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House group that helps coordinate environmental policy across the administration.

Trump has renominated Hartnett White, who also rejects any risk of human-caused climate change, after Senate hearings failed to confirm her for the post. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has said she is “wildly unqualified” for the role because she “outright rejects basic science.”

Retired Princeton physics professor William Happer, a director of the CO2 Coalition, was touted as a possible chief science advisor to the Trump White House. Happer also denies that increased levels of CO2 will be a problem for the planet. The CO2Coalition was caught in a sting by Greenpeace, in which Happer offered to route money from work for a ficticious fossil fuel company through the organization.

Telling Fiji Not to Worry

Mörner has produced at least six journal articles on the back of the Fiji trip, several co-written with Virginia-based researcher Matlack-Klein, and acknowledged the funding of the CO2 Coalition on several occasions. Matlack-Klein’s affiliation is given as the “Portuguese Sea Level Project, Appomattox, Virginia” but DeSmog could find no public record of the project. Klein did not respond to emails.

Mörner used his research to claim that concerns that Fijians had about rising sea levels were misplaced, and used the then-approaching United Nations climate talks hosted by Fiji (but held in Germany) last fall to publicize his work, writing an open letter to the country’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama.

DeSmog sent emails to Mörner, Klein, and Happer, who signs the CO2 Coalition’s tax forms, with questions about the research, but received no responses.

One leading Australian scientist, the geophysicist Professor Kurt Lambeck, reviewed several of the papers and said in his view, none would have been accepted to a recognized scientific journal with solid peer-review procedures.

Little Academic Standing

Mörner has been targeting fringe journals with official-sounding names but highly questionable quality controls, in order to publish the papers.

All the journals are “open access,” which means the scientists pay for their work to be published and the results are available to the public for free.

In October 2017, Mörner presented his findings alongside Matlack-Klein, at a climate meeting in Rome which, as DeSmog revealed, was hijacked by Mörner, who was on the organizing committee, and who listed several climate science deniers as speakers.

Kurt Lambeck, Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University, said all of the papers had appeared in journals “of little academic standing” and that “none would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals.”

He said that two papers which appeared in journals published by a company called “Scientific Research Publishing” were “trivial” and added “no insight into either the evidence for sea-level change nor on coastal erosion processes” beyond what was already well known.

He said: “It is well understood that human influences are one of the most important contributors to changes in coastal erosion and does not need restatement in a scientific paper.”

A third paper was published in a little-known online journal with the title International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Lambeck said this paper should have been “rejected out of hand” because Mörner had presented no evidence to back up his claim.

In the paper Mörner argued that ocean levels were being driven by changes in solar winds that changed the rotation of the earth, causing ocean masses to shift towards or away from the poles depending on conditions on the sun. This, Mörner claimed, was the likely explanation for ocean levels around Fiji for 500 years.

Lambeck says he first heard Mörner make this general argument in 1979 during a symposium presentation where it was pointed out to him that the impacts of his proposed mechanisms were “improbable” but, even if they were present, were “orders of magnitude too small” to be effective on sea levels.

Lambeck says that significantly, in order for Mörner to make his arguments about changing sea levels, he had ignored other well-known research in respected journals. In particular, Mörner overlooks the findings that major changes in sea level had historically been driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers and also, in more recent times, by thermal expansion of the oceans.

Academic Paper or Angry Email?

A fourth paper reads more like an angry email to a colleague than a scientific journal article. It starts with a reference to a story in “The Mail” that Mörner claimed had shown that global temperature records held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were being manipulated to show global temperatures were rising.

Mörner is referring to claims supposedly made by a former NOAA employee, John Bates, and reported in the Daily Mail. Mörner does not refer to the many scientists who dismissed the claims of fraud — including Bates himself. He also ignores how the Independent Press Standards Organization ruled that the Daily Mail had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” a ruling which resulted in a 659-word correction to the article.

In this paper Mörner goes on to claim that sea level records derived from satellite measurement are also being nefariously and unethically manipulated, but offers no evidence.

Lambeck says that in this paper, Mörner quotes mainly from his own writings and ignores other multiple technical analyses that have carefully considered how issues with satellite and tide gauge measurements have been identified and checked. He also ignores the specific rebuttals by recognized experts in the field, refuting the very conclusions he had made.

“To simply compare the globaly average trend with a few short tide gauge records is something that no reasonable person would consider,” Lambeck said.

Lambeck concluded that Mörner was “not handicapped by knowledge of physical processes, not interested in testing his hypotheses even by simple order of magnitude calculations, nor in trying to understand what others may have written.”

'Predatory' Publishers?

So-called “open access” publishing brands have boomed in recent years, with hundreds of new titles appearing.

Many journals are based in either China or India and have names that resemble other, more legitimate journals.

Some people have characterized these journals as “predatory” due to the fees involved, in return for copy-editing services that are of questionable quality and, judging from the quality of some of the work which appears, a peer-review system that exists in name only.

Academics submitting research to these journals have to pay a fee for them to appear, creating a potential conflict where the publisher earns more cash when they encourage more researchers to publish.

This has seen journals spamming researchers around the world, encouraging them to submit articles, join editorial boards, or speak and attend conferences.

To avoid academics being caught out, many organizations have issued guidelines to members, such as the Council of Science Editors, The Royal Society of New Zealand, the World Association of Medical Editors, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

In addition, academics have reported being named on editorial boards without their knowledge. One major publisher, OMICS International, based in Hyderabad, India, claims to run more than 700 peer-reviewed journals.

Open Access Publishers Caught in Stings

Mörner targeted five publishers for his work on the “Fiji New Sea Level Project,” which he wrote was “supported by a kind grant from the CO2 Coalition.”

The International Journal of Engineering Science and Invention offers to publish papers for just $75. The journal has no contact address, but is published by “Invention Journals” and has a Gmail address as a contact. The journal’s website and the publisher’s website were registered by a “Chetan Sharma” in Uttar Pradesh, India.

One Mörner paper, repeating identical arguments and observations from other papers, appeared in the Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology, published by MedCrave Group.

MedCrave Group’s published mailing address in Edmond, Oklahoma, matches that of a parcel service.

One MedCrave journal — Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal — was exposed in a sting operation in April 2017, when an editor wrote a fake case report based on an episode of Seinfeld using the name of a character that appeared in the TV show. The paper was accepted and published by the journal, but was later removed.

Scientific Research Publishing, where two of Mörner’s articles appeared, was one of five publishers reviewed by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall, whose blog used to document and list suspected predatory journals until it was taken down in 2017. Scientific Research Publishing now discloses its origins as being in China.

Juniper Publishing Group, which published another of Mörner’s Fiji papers, lists a residential property in Simi Valley, California, as its contact address. The website was registered using a privacy service, concealing the name of the website creator. Beall has described Juniper as “rotten to the core” and a publisher “to be avoided by all researchers.”

Juniper was caught in another hoax, this time from Australian public health professor Mike Daube who created a fake academic profile based on the credentials of his pet dog and an affiliation with a fake veterinary school. Juniper’s “Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine” was one journal to accept “Dr. Olivia Doll” as a member of its editorial board.

Daube provided a picture of “Dr. Doll” to the journals — an image of Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. On its website, Juniper says the publisher “have been established with the aim of spreading quality scientific information to the research community throughout the universe.”

Another journal targeted by Mörner was the International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences, published by Graphy Publications, which gives an address in Bangalore, India, as a contact.

A barely legible webpage describing the journal’s aims says: “We encourage authors, who always have shown more interest to publish his work in the prestigious journals, and avail them the freely to the scientific community.”

Both Mörner and Matlack-Klein gave presentations to a conference for climate science deniers held in London in 2016 which was organized by the so-called Independent Committee on Geoethics (a group apparently set up to investigate climate scientists for fraud).

Mörner was a founder of that group, which includes as members two other Australia-based climate science deniers who reject the evidence of rising sea levels and have similarly targeted obscure journals with their work.

german jrnl punked by soon and balinus? kathie thx, conney fed to cheney, bush 180 on ghg pledge

sci mag backs noaa on karl study BS 2/17

AN 4 25

One prestigious journal for doctors who work in pulmonary health is now confirming the receipt of a letter sent by Ed Martin, who is the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in President Donald Trump's Department of Justice.

NBC News reported Friday that the CHEST journal — which is published by the 22,000-member American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) — got a letter from Martin asking various questions about its editorial practices. This reportedly included whether it was influenced by advertisers, allowed for "viewpoint diversity" and if it protects readers from misinformation.

"“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter read, which also warned editors: “You have certain responsibilities.”

Eric Reinhart, who is a Chicago-based clinician, political anthropologist and social psychiatrist, obtained a copy of the letter and posted it to his X account. He called on editors of journals like CHEST to form a unified opposition to the administration.

IFrame Content

"The Trump regime is now using US Attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure ‘viewpoint diversity,'" Reinhart tweeted. "Journal editors should be public about this and coordinate to refuse to comply with these fascist tactics."

JT Morris, who is a senior supervising attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), expressed a similar sentiment regarding Martin's letter to the CHEST journal.

“It’s really unusual when you see a U.S. Attorney from the Distinct of Columbia sending a letter to a publication based in Illinois inquiring about their editorial practices, in particular, a journal from a medical organization,” Morris said. “That screams of a government official going after a publication because it disagrees with what the publication is saying.”

Click here to read NBC's report in its entirety.

State College, Pa. — WITH world leaders gathered in Paris to address climate change, most of the planet seems to have awakened to the reality that the Earth is warming and that we’re responsible.

But not Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He has long disputed the overwhelming scientific evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are changing the climate. Now he is using his committee chairmanship to go after the government’s own climate scientists, whose latest study is an inconvenience to his views.

In October, Mr. Smith issued a subpoena to Kathryn D. Sullivan, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, demanding all internal notes, emails and correspondence concerning a study its scientists published in the journal Science. The study found that the “rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than what was seen during the latter half of the 20th century.”

correction!

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/10062015/willie-soons-fossil-fuel-funded-work-draws-ethics-review-publisher

journal publisher that distributed studies written by a climate skeptic whose work was financed by fossil fuel interests has launched an ethics investigation over undisclosed funding.

The investigation by Elsevier, a global network of scientific journals, was prompted by documents showing that Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Willie Soon failed to disclose industry funding in 11 studies published by nine journals.

Six of those papers were published in four Elsevier publications. Elsevier requires its authors to disclose financial conflicts that "could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work."

The documents were obtained by Greenpeace and made public in February by the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental watchdog organization based in Virginia. After the documents were released, the center alerted the journals that the lack of disclosure violates ethical guidelines requiring authors to identify their funders and potential conflicts of interest.

"We applaud your guidelines for ethical behavior in science, but we are concerned that your conflict of interest policy has been ignored and that Dr. Soon may have hidden his funding," wrote Kert Davies, the center's executive director, in letters to the journals. "Violations of ethical norms in scientific publishing may undermine the credibility of your journal."

Elsivier's ethics inquiry was made public in a report issued by the center Wednesday that includes the responses from all nine journals.

"We have referred the matter to Elsevier and they have an ethics team investigating," Rob Hyndman, editor of International Journal of Forecasting, said in a response to Davies. "We will not be taking any action until we have received advice from the Elsevier ethics investigators."

Chris Capot, a spokesman for Elsevier, confirmed the investigation, but declined to discuss the nature of the review or any potential outcomes. "The review is still ongoing. The results of our review will be published in any affected journals," Capot said.

In addition to the Elsevier inquiry, one publication, Journal of Climate, amended a 2009 paper that Soon co-authored to clarify his funding source. The editor of Ecology Law Quarterly, published by the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the school is considering instituting a formal procedure to address conflicts in all of its publications. Others responded with noncommittal acknowledgements thanking the center for the information. One journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics, dismissed Soon's failure to disclose his funding as "irrelevant."

Soon, a well-known climate contrarian, works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which houses the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Soon has been employed by Smithsonian since 1997, but relies on grants from outside sources for his research and salary.

Soon's 11 papers question the extent, severity, cause or existence of man-made climate change. Many of the studies argue that changes in solar activity are responsible for rising global temperatures. The studies appear to have had limited impact in the scientific world, according to the number of citations by other researchers.

Soon did not respond to a request for comment from InsideClimate News.

The public records show that since 2008, Soon has received more than $800,000 from ExxonMobil, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the electric utility Southern Company Services Inc., and Donors Trust Inc., an organization that facilitates contributions largely toward conservative causes from donors who wish to remain anonymous. The funds were earmarked to pay for research papers, public speaking appearances and presentations. Soon called his studies "deliverable" to funders.

Since the controversy broke, Southern Company, a major coal utility in the southeastern United States and one of Soon's primary funders, has said it will no longer fund his research once his final project is completed later this year.

Smithsonian officials directed its inspector general to examine Soon's ethical practices regarding funders and launched separate internal and independent reviews of its ethics and disclosure policies. Soon remains a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian staff, though Smithsonian has distanced itself from his work, saying it “does not support Dr. Soon's conclusions on climate change.”

Here are the responses from the nine journals:

Ecological Complexity

Publisher: Elsevier

Journal disclosure policy: All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.

Response: Bia-lian (Larry) Li, editor:

Thank you for your message and mail, Director Davies. I was the Chief Editor when his paper was published. Our journal policies are set up by our publisher Elsevier, not us. The case you presented here, to my view, should be author's responsibility. We generally focus on scientific merit of the research papers. However, your concern is now well noticed.

Ecology Law Quarterly

Publisher: UC Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Elise O’Dea, editor:

I want to thank you for bringing this issue to our attention; both ELQ and the law school take it very seriously. Your email brings up an important topic not only for ELQ, but for all the law journals on campus. Thanks to your alert, we are exploring the possibility of developing a conflict of interest policy of some nature for our law journals.

Interfaces

Publisher: The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Miranda Walker, director of publications INFORMS:

Thank you for your letter of February 20, 2015 sent to Dr. Srinivas Bollapragada regarding the journal Interfaces and our conflict of interest policy. Maintaining the highest ethical standards is of paramount importance to Interfaces, our editors, our peer reviewers, and of course, those who read the articles published in our pages. We appreciate the information that you and others have shared with us and will ensure that it receives careful and deliberate attention. Please direct all future questions regarding or relating to [this article] to me.

International Journal of Forecasting

Publisher: Elsevier

Response: Rob Hyndman, editor:

We have referred the matter to Elsevier and they have an ethics team investigating. We have also received correspondence from Dr. Soon and from his lawyers which we have passed to Elsevier. We will not be taking any action until we have received advice from the Elsevier ethics investigators.

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics

Publisher: Elsevier

Response: Robert Strangeway, editor:

I am aware of the New York Times article, and I have contacted the Editorial Office of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics for guidance as to what the Journal should do in response to the allegations in the New York Times article. I have also forwarded your email and the associated attachments to the Journal Publisher. While we have not yet determined what action the Journal will take, the Publisher of the Journal has made it clear that such allegations are taken very seriously.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Publisher: EDP Sciences

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Dr. Thierry Forveille, editor:

I am a bit puzzled that you contact me. (The paper) makes no claim whatsoever of any relevance to climate. It therefore clearly falls well outside the purview of Dr. Soon's contract with Southern Company Services for “publication of both original and review papers on solar variability and climate change and various environmental impacts of that related change in leading scientific journals for the advancement of climate and meteorological sciences.” Astronomy & Astrophysics has no funding disclosure requirements, since astronomy is sufficiently removed from any monetary consequences that we have never found that necessary, but had we known about Dr. Soon's contract we would have judged its existence irrelevant to the evaluation of the paper. That Dr. Soon included this totally irrelevant paper in the Year 1 Report, which you forwarded me, certainly does not reflect very well on his ethical standards, but this is an issue that I don't think the journal has standing to act on.

Journal of Climate

Publisher: American Meteorological Society

Journal disclosure policy: All funding sources should be identified in the manuscript. Authors should disclose to the editor any financial arrangement with a research sponsor that could give the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Response: Ken Heideman, director of publications at American Meteorological Society:

AMS has amended the 2009 paper that Willie Soon coauthored with a publisher’s note and an amendment to the acknowledgments that make clear his funding source.

New Astronomy

Publisher: Elsevier

Response: Gianfranco Brunetti, receiving editor:

I received your documents (via mail), thanks a lot. In the last several [months] we had a discussion within the board of editors about this situation, I guess that similar discussions were taken by other boards and journals involved. Obviously I cannot reveal the details of the discussion and the outcome, however I would expect...a "fair note"...from Elsevier.

Physical Geography

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Online

Journal disclosure policy: Authors must declare any potential conflict of interest – be it professional or financial – which could be held to arise with respect to the article. Authors must disclose all sources of funding for the research reported in the paper.

Response: Carol Harden, editor:

Thank you for keeping us informed about this. An important piece of information missing from the letter you sent is that Physical Geography was not published by Taylor & Francis in 2009, and it did not have a financial disclosure policy at that time. That means that Physical Geography cannot make the claim that Dr. Soon violated the journal's policy.

DDT and Sucralose: A Case Study in Chemophobia

By Chad Jones | May 10, 2013

Recently I met with several chemists to discuss chemophobia. The discussion was light-hearted for the most part, but the topic was something important to each of us. It’s a topic that just about every blogger within the chemistry community has written about at one point or another. During the discussion an article by Dr. Joseph Mercola was brought up. In that article he states that:

“Splenda is actually more similar to DDT than sugar.”

A fairly strong accusation, given the carcinogenic nature of DDT. The thing is, DDT isn’t really similar to sucralose at all. Within 24 hours of our discussion the subject was covered by several chemistry bloggers, all of them coming to the same conclusion – Dr. Mercola pulled that claim right out of his…well, let’s just say that it seems he made it up. In any case, I don’t necessarily want to point out why his claim is wrong; that’s been done. I’d like to use his claim as a case study for chemophobia. Let’s see if we can deconstruct his argument and learn something about chemophobia and the way it’s sold to the public.

An extensive audience base

Dr. Mercola speaks to a fairly large audience. His website claims to be a ”reliable source of health articles, optimal wellness products, medical news, and free natural newsletter from natural health expert Dr. Joseph Mercola”. And, unfortunately, people are listening. The sucralose/DDT article has nearly 350,000 pageviews.Chemophobia is often sold to the public by powerful, influential people. Chemists, on the other hand, are excruciatingly bad at PR. We don’t have the influence and, frankly, we’re not presenting our message in a very appealing way. We (chemists) need to start devoting more time to science outreach if we want to keep up with chemophobia. In saying this I don’t mean to discount the work that many chemists are already doing. I appreciate the hard work that’s already being done. We are aware of the problem, and I’m not the first to sound a cry for action. But we need to (and we can) do more.

Fraudulent health claims

You’ll find that most chemophobic claims are aimed at our health, and this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’re an easy target for fraudulent health claims because our health is important to us. Nobody wants illness and death in their family, so we’re easily frightened by a claim that common chemicals can hurt or even kill us. This gives an unfair advantage to “team chemophobia” – the general public is very impressionable when it comes to health claims. This means that “team chemistry” has to be extra vigilant of fraudulent health claims.

Shifting the responsibility to research the claim

One of the first things I noticed in the Mercola sucralose article was the complete lack of references. In total I only found three outside sources. One of those leads to a dead ScienceDirect link and another is hidden at the bottom. That leaves only one reference. One.Every other claim (and he makes many) is either assumed to be true or backed up by a reference to himself. In total he links to his own website14 times.[entine does this]

This is a common tactic. When speaking to the public it’s easy to slip in an unsubstantiated claim – especially if you’re in a position of authority. Not only are most of Mercola’s claims poorly sourced, but his primary claim, that sucraolse is more similar to DDT than sugar, is completely unsourced. In fact, the entire section wherein he makes the claim doesn’t link to a single source. The reader is left with only an authoritative “That’s right“, as if the comparison of DDT to sucralose was so common that everyone knows it. By leaving out sources he shifts the responsibility to properly research the subject from himself to his readers. In most cases his readers won’t research any further, and his claim is simply assumed to be true.

Fallacious comparisons

Mercola claims in this article that sucralose is more similar to DDT than to sugar. I think Dorea, from chemicalsareyourfriends.com makes it very clear that this claim isn’t true. It doesn’t take a chemist to notice that sucralose is much more similar to sucrose than to DDT. However, Dr. Mercola may have meant that sucralose is functionallyormetabolicallysimilar to DDT instead of structurallysimilar. Unfortunately he doesn’t really explain what he means by “more similar” very well, and he gives no source to clarify what he meant. It’s another example of shifting the responsibility to research his claims, and I’ve never seen a reliable source that compare sucralose (anon-toxic sweetener) to DDT (a known carcinogen).

It’s interesting to note that this isn’t the only time that Mercola has incorrectly compared a chemical to DDT. He also claims thatglyphosate, a common herbicide, is similar to DDT. He interviews a Dr. Huber, who claims that glyphosate is toxic (it’s not) and that it bio-accumulates (it doesn’t). Even more surprising, Dr. Huber says he would prefer exposure to DDT over exposure to glyphosate. This in spite of the fact that DDT is a known carcinogen and glyphosate is not considered to be dangerous.

Anecdotal evidence

As part of Mercola’s evidence he links to a set of testimonials about “The Potential Dangers of Sucralose”. Experienced science advocates will know immediately that anecdotes do not provide evidence on par with controlled studies of sucralose. However, anecdotes are very effective for the type of argument he is trying to present. Personal stories play well with the general public. They’re emotional, frightening, and seem trustworthy (they’re not). Anecdotes are compelling because, frankly, we believe ourselves. We trust our own senses (even though there areplenty of reasons we shouldn’t). If we’re interested in “fighting” chemophobia, though, we need to be aware of how convincing anecdotes can be, and be prepared to respond to them.

Bringing it all together

Once again, the purpose of this post isn’t to show how Dr. Mercola is wrong. Chemists are becoming more and more vocal against chemophobia. As we speak out let’s make sure we’re not dismissive of the opposing arguments. It may be easy to point out how silly an argument sounds, but that may not always be the best approach. Remember, chemophobia may be an irrational fear of chemicals, but it’s also a compelling fear of chemicals, as evidenced by its increasing popularity. We need to be careful not to alienate the very people we’re trying to convince.

About the Author: Chad Jones received a BS in Chemistry from Weber State University. He is currently a graduate student studying physical chemistry at Brigham Young University. When he's not struggling to earn a PhD he maintains The Collapsed Wavefunction and hosts a science discussion series on YouTube. Chad is a member of the American Chemical Society and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. Follow on Twitter@TheCollapsedPsi.

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