Censorship Again?
Yours truly, Bitter and Twisted (retired)
A good friend of mine just alerted me to Robert Malone’s latest substack.
Malone is surprised to find an article on ‘Censorship and Defamation’ in the era of covid published in a journal owned by Springer. He is right to be surprised and I will be surprised if Springer does not insist in the very near future that the article is retracted, see below. Actually I had intended to write a comment to this effect on Malone’s substack only to find that only paid subscribers can comment! Perhaps this is the difference between scientists who have spent their careers in industry and those like myself who have languished in academia?
Back to my point. Springer is the pre-eminent cheerleader for the pharmaceutical industry and leads the way, along with Elsevier, in censorship of academic science. I have written extensively on this subject in my book. However, for a recent example involving both Elsevier and Springer read Jennifer Margulis’ recent substack about my old friend Jose Domingo. The publishers colluded in their efforts to force Domingo to resign as Editor-in-Chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology.
Springer, the owner of Nature and all its offspring journals, exerts its influence upon published science in myriad, often unseen ways. Take for example my recent seminal paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports. This paper, published in 2020, has to date been accessed an incredible 62k times. Since Scientific Reports likes to highlight Top Articles published each year one might expect to find my paper in such a list. Indeed based upon the number of accesses to date it should appear in the top ten of the collection called Journal Overall Top 100. It doesn’t and so I decided to ask the journal why it doesn’t. After more than a month I received a reply from the Chief Editor of Scientific Reports no less. I am copying his reply below.
Dear Dr Exley,
I apologise for the delay in getting back to you about this.
Most likely the paper did not fulfil inclusion criteria at the time when this list was compiled.
Sincerely,
Rafal
Dr Rafal Marszalek
Chief Editor
Scientific Reports
When I questioned this I did receive another brief reply which essentially said that the lists are static (meaning they are not kept up to date) and when the lists for 2020 were compiled (31/03/2021) my paper had not fulfilled inclusion criteria neither for Journal Overall Top 100 nor Neuroscience Top 100. If one considers that the majority of papers included in the latter have to date been accessed less than 10k times then I am prone to doubt this explanation. If it looks and smells like censorship then I am going to conclude that it is and in doing so I am questioning the honesty of Rafal Marslazek the Chief Editor of Nature’s Scientific Reports. Apparently Marslazek is very big on research integrity as identified in a recent interview. His comments in this interview on the use of hydroxychloroquine in treating the symptoms of covid suggest otherwise.
Well, it could just be that I am all bitter and twisted and see censorship and fraud where none exists. I’ll let you decide about this.
thanks for continuing to post, it's v useful to me to get more insight whilst at the same time utterly infuriating that it doesn't hit the wider media - or indeed the general public. Nor does it help you in any practical way which is terrible. There should be apologies and compensation. Instead of which it is not even acknowledged. I continue to find it unbelievable how the parents at my daughter's school do not do any kind of research whatsoever into what goes into their young children (mine is now 5). The whole school gets their nasal flu spray next week, that is ALL the children on one day... but not my child. Hard to explain it all to her.
Chris Wark survived colon cancer using many holistic treatments as well as surgery. His book Chris Beat Cancer had a very large readership, but The New York Times declined to put it on its bestseller list although, based on numbers, it qualified. They gave him some cockamamie explanation when he inquired about it.