{"id":216,"date":"2025-07-09T11:01:54","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T11:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/?p=216"},"modified":"2025-07-10T11:09:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T11:09:50","slug":"yes-junk-science-is-published-but-once-again-trumps-administration-misses-the-mark-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/09\/yes-junk-science-is-published-but-once-again-trumps-administration-misses-the-mark-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, \u201cjunk science\u201d is published, but once again Trump\u2019s administration misses the mark (Opinion)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Communications experts suggest that the best way to get a conversation going with someone you disagree with is to ask them to talk about themselves. Unfortunately, I have found that asking \u201cWhat the heck is wrong with you??!?\u201d is really not a good way to start a productive conversation. But I am not ready to abandon it entirely.<\/span><\/p>\n

My most recent voicing of that question was in response to last week\u2019s announcement that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had canceled its subscriptions to the 3,000 or so scientific journals published by Springer Nature. According to Andrew Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, \u201cAll contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active. Precious taxpayer dollars should be (sic) not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As a former editor at Nature Publishing, I would quibble with Nixon\u2019s misinformed assessment of the quality of science published in the peer-reviewed <\/span>Nature<\/span><\/i> journals, and the central importance of most of those publications for overall scientific knowledge and progress. I suspect his real objection to the <\/span>Nature<\/span><\/i> titles (or the objection of his boss, whom he is obviously parroting) is not that the published science is junk, but rather that it contradicts the pseudoscientific brain-worm droppings of the HHS secretary and those around him. In that context, \u201cWhat the heck is wrong with you?\u201d seems like an eminently reasonable thing to ask.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be fair, there is a lamentable increase in the number of scientific papers being published that can only be described as, well, \u201cjunk science.\u201d This contamination of the literature includes an alarming proliferation of outright fraudulent publications in an expanding avalanche of new digital-only \u201cscience journals.\u201d The primary reason for this rapid growth is the unrelenting pressure on scientists to publish often and in as good a journal as possible to earn tenure, hire post-docs and techs, keep grant money coming in, and maybe even found a biotech pipe-dream company. Publication count and quality have pushed aside virtually all other metrics of scientific worth in many places.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sadly and predictably, despite ongoing efforts to stop it, publication quality has suffered as the quantity has increased. About two million papers across all science publishing history were indexed in the main publication databases in 2016. Five years later, three million papers have appeared, despite a drop in the number of new PhD students and researchers. Fewer scientists are writing and\/or reviewing far more papers than ever before: an unsustainable situation. As a result, the quality of peer review — the primary guardian of scientific quality \u2014 suffers, which in turn leads to crappy papers and the not-entirely inaccurate statements like those of HHS\u2019s Nixon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n