Environmental Health Perspectives, one of the world’s most influential journals in the field, is not currently accepting new manuscripts for publication due to science budget cuts made by the US government. The open-access journal does not charge fees to readers or authors of its articles, something made possible thanks to its link to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has funded the journal since it was created in 1972.
The publishers decided to suspend operations because they do not know if they will receive the funding needed to renew contracts with suppliers—the Trump administration has proposed reducing the NIH budget from US$48 billion in 2025 to US$27 billion in 2026. The pause also affects a sister title, the Journal of Health and Pollution, which was created in 2011. Two journals from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may also stop circulating if proposed cuts to the institution’s budget are approved. One is Emerging Infectious Diseases, whose reports on infectious diseases of concern are used as a reference worldwide.
The scientific community is also worried about perceived government intimidation. In April, prestigious medical journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), JAMA, Chest Journal, and Obstetrics and Gynecology received a letter from Edward R. Martin Jr, appointed interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia by the Trump administration, suggesting that they were breaking the law by taking sides in academic debates, and demanding answers to a set of questions, such as “Do you accept submissions of articles with competing viewpoints?” and “Are you transparent about the influence of supporters, fundraisers, and advertisers?”
The prosecutor also wanted to know what influence the NIH had on the articles submitted. Obstetrics and Gynecology, published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, has long been the target of conservative groups because it publishes articles on reproductive health programs or diversity and gender programs that benefit from federally funded projects.
Eric Rubin, editor of NEJM, described the letter he received as “threatening.” “We were concerned because there were questions that suggested that we may be biased. We aren’t. We spend a lot of time choosing the right articles to publish and trying to get the message right,” he said, according to the media organization NPR. The journal responded to the prosecutor’s questions with a statement disputing the insinuations and invoking the US constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression and of the press: “We use rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish. We support the editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression.”
Biochemist Jeremy Berg, former editor of Science, says that the government’s strategy is to intimidate journals into publishing articles that align with its ideas on topics such as vaccines and climate change, even if they are of poor quality. It is true that the US attorney’s letter is in line with the discourse of health officials from the Trump administration. Physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya, currently director of the NIH and a researcher at Stanford University, was heavily criticized during the pandemic for arguing against social distancing (he backed letting the virus spread naturally) and the mandatory use of masks. He recently founded the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, open to studies with alternative perspectives of the pandemic, such as an article by Bhattacharya himself that highlights planning flaws in the clinical trials of Covid vaccines. Robert Kennedy Jr, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been threatening to sue various medical journals, which he accuses of colluding with pharmaceutical companies. In a 2024 podcast appearance, Kennedy said that the NEJM “lied to the public” and retracted articles that contained “real science.”
According to Amanda Shanor, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania, information published in reputable medical publications is broadly protected by the American constitution and covered by the same robust rights that apply to newspapers. She told The New York Times that the prosecutor’s letter “appears aimed at creating a type of fear and chill that will have effects on people’s expression” and that this represents a “constitutional concern.”
Martin Jr’s reproach caused confusion among academics. “Scientists criticize each other all the time, and journals are full of scientific disagreements and reinterpretation of data,” Marcus Munafò, a psychologist from the University of Bristol, UK, and an expert in research integrity, told the journal Science. He acknowledges that science can be flawed and that there is a lack of political diversity in certain academic environments. “But scientists are trying to determine what is true and to advance knowledge. What policymakers decide to do with the evidence is a separate issue.”
The actions of the Trump administration did not even resonate among those who complain about the lack of support for minority views in science. Sociologist Nicole Simovski, director of the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for greater diversity of viewpoints at universities, stated on the group’s website that several initiatives are being tested to give voice to alternative scientific opinion. Creating journals dedicated to topics neglected by the mainstream is one idea. Another is a project that proposes collaboration between scientists with conflicting theoretical and ideological approaches, with the objective of producing more accurate results free from bias or ambiguity (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 335). These new approaches, she emphasizes, are being led by experts who seek to identify problems and solve them with their academic peers, which is very different from “governmental interventions by nonexperts to impose viewpoints in scientific publishing.”
Republish