Alison McCook at Retraction Watch:
First, an occupational health journal appointed a new editor with industry ties without consulting the editorial board. Then, with no explanation, it withdrew a paper by the previous editor that was critical of corporate-sponsored research — again, without consulting the editorial board.
At that point, they’d had enough.
Yesterday, the editorial board of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health sent a letter to the publisher, Taylor & Francis, expressing their “grave concerns” over the future of the journal, and its recent actions.
As part of the letter — signed by 30 past and present editorial members and the founding editor — they write:
IJOEH has stood in a class by itself in publishing critical analyses and challenges of improper corporate influence on the standards of practice and scientific literature in our field.
Originally, we raised serious concern that the Editorial Board was never consulted or informed by T&F about the change of editors, replacing Dr. David Egilman with corporate consultant Dr. Andrew Maier. We wrote to the publisher on February 11 requesting to know the process and justification for changing editors of a scientific journal without involving the Editorial Board.
As an illustration of their concerns, the board members note that Maier — chair of the fellows program at Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), which the letter-writers dub a “corporate consulting firm” — recommends a significantly higher safe limit for diacetyl, a flavoring chemical used in microwave popcorn, than did former editor Egilman.
This month, the journal withdrew a 2016 paper by Egilman, “The production of corporate research to manufacture doubt about the health hazards of products: an overview of the Exponent Bakelite simulation study,” with a curt statement:
This content has been removed by the publishers.
The board members conclude their letter (which you can see here, with contact information redacted) with four demands ...
It is difficult to fully trust research that has been conducted for a business firm, government agency, non-profit, or whatever, that has clear organizational goals that may deviate from discover of facts or the truth. Business firms that seek to maximize profits tend to sponsor research that leads to higher profits. Non-profit organizations and government agencies tend to sponsor research that expands and/or protects the organization/agency. The degree to which you can trust the research can only be judged on a case-by-case basis considering context, the degree to which the research seems biased towards the sponsor's goals, etc. The problem is much worse when the researchers are not required to reveal their funding sources, but this problem seems to be going away as researchers are required to disclose funding and conflicts of interest.
This journal sounds like it is going downhill.
