Scientific publishers consider censoring "dangerous" research.

Abstract

In what some consider a pre-emptive strike to avert heavy-handed US government regulations, more than 20 publishers of leading scientific journals--including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)--committed themselves to rejecting data that could be misused for bioterror attacks. In their joint "Statement on Scientific Publication and Security" the editors and publishers stressed, however, that the journals have an obligation to "protect the integrity of the scientific process by publishing manuscripts of high quality, in sufficient detail to permit reproducibility" because "open publication brings benefits not only to public health but also to efforts to combat terrorism." The announcement--made public during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Denver in mid-February and subsequently published in several key journals--calls for "self-governance" by the scientific community as an alternative to government control of forthcoming articles. "It is up to us in the scientific community to define the standards and to establish the framework to ensure that critical information is withheld from terrorists while permitting the continued advancement of biomedical research and the protection of public health," said Dr Ronald Arias, president of the American Society for Microbiology, one of the strongest advocates of self-policing measures. "This is work in progress, however, and we will have to continually seek to improve the process and, more specifically, define what sort of information might constitute a dangerous 'cookbook' for terrorists." The joint statement was signed by, among others, editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Virology, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It urges editors to modify articles or to decline to publish them if potential risks outweigh the benefits resulting from the publication of, say, the identification of a virulence cluster in a certain pathogen. Critics of the new publication guidelines contend, however, that editors and referees would by no means be capable of objectively assessing what constitutes potentially "dangerous" science, that is, identify papers that were likely to cause more harm than good. "I've studied these things for 50 years, and I couldn't make that judgement, and I don't see how editors of journals can do either. The job of journals is to judge the scientific quality of things, not to act as people who censor or make these kind of decisions, which are more political than they are scientific," said Dr Stanley Falkow, a microbiologist at Stanford University, in the New York Times. …