In 2009, with a Democrat back in the White House, corporate science and medical journal publishers asked Rep. John Conyers, Jr., a staunch ally of President Obama, to get the new president to issue an executive order and undo the work of his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
What they wanted undone was the Republican's effort to make taxpayer-funded research "open access." Free to read for the public that paid for academic findings. Publishers were melting down. They had a great business model; the public paid to fund research and then academics who wanted to publish handed it over to a corporation who got it peer-reviewed for free and then owned a copyright on the results.
President Bush didn't like that the people who paid for science to be conducted then had to pay $30 to read the results so over the objections of Democrats he stated that programs funded by the National Institutes of Health had to be free to read. To President Obama's credit, he was unswayed by Conyers but, as as he did with human embryonic stem cells, he made a minor modification; it would stay limited to work funded by the NIH and only available for free after a year.(1)
Since then, corporate media has only gotten more partisan. Not just journals, pop science magazines as well.(2)
That has led to a call to make journals more balanced - by rolling out a 'conservative' one.
Republicans are not the first to come up with this scheme. When conservative talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh became popular, Democrats wanted to subsidize a left-wing version. It never went anywhere, the government was already funding NPR and another one didn't gather much interest, and a 'conservative' journal might suffer the same fate.
But Democrats are in a state of war about a competitor anyway - even though no one has tried to make one.
Their concern is because Dr. Heidi Overton, M.D., has been nominated to run the US Food and Drug Administration and a few years ago said offhand on a podcast that “We need publications and academic journals that are conservative-based. We need research funding that is willing to say, ‘No, let’s fund these type of studies.’ That’s not happening at the [National Institutes of Health]. The FDA isn’t prioritizing those kind of decisions, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] certainly is not.”
Do things someone claimed years ago suddenly matter? When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said her efforts to Defund The Police back then don't count now ("Woke 1.0 was crazy"), her party rolled with it and said she should be President . Michigan soon-to-be Senator(3) Abdul El-Sayed, who said Jewish people being attacked in the US deserved it because Israel still existed, was likewise absolved because he didn't say it last week.
Why be concerned about Overton three years ago? Well, that's politics.
Here's the thing. Journals should be conservative. Just not in the political sense. The entire idea of peer-review is "conservative", you have to prove your ideas have merit to others in your field. Instead of being conservative, as they were in the past, a journal seriously published a "study" claiming that female-named hurricanes led to more deaths because men are sexist. That same journal, PNAS, even published an experiment by Facebook manipulating news feeds to change their reactions. It even published a claim that a weedkiller made frogs gay, no peer-review needed. That last one has never been retracted even though no one can replicate the claims and the scholar behind it has refused to share any data.
That is just off the top of my head and one journal. There are hundreds of papers that are just as shoddy or worse published each month. They are overwhelmingly in the social sciences and epidemiology, but we have an anti-vaccine movement because of a British science journal publishing a result that any college statistics student would've debunked in 30 seconds because of bad methodology. The vast majority are polluting public trust in science. Because journals are in business to make money and they know what 'sells' to corporate media journalists and their subscribers. If that is "liberal", liberalism has lost its way.
A conservative journal won't fix that by doing it for the other side. The free market takes care of this stuff. A journal that won't be read by Republicans is just an easy way to lose money because corporate media is still anti-Republican. The Guardian and New York Times will never carry anything they publish, unless they are making fun of it in a way they never did about Andrew Wakefield's 'vaccines cause autism' paper in the peer-reviewed and prestigious journal The Lancet. They instead endorsed it.
Overton's comment had no traction at all until she got the FDA nomination. Then a Democratic PAC got a psychologist (94% Democrats) at a nonprofit they created to release it and claim Dr. Overton would ruin science publishing.
Dr. Heidi Overton. Credit: US Government
Scientific American, rightly in this case, covered it but their article lacks any insight of the actual landscape that exists. A 'conservative' journal would be shadow-banned by media outlets unless they published something just as stupid as that math is inherently sexist and fighting obesity is racist - all claims Scientific American covered without any critical thinking at all. There is no need to be concerned about her beliefs about the partisan nature of journal publishing, because FDA does not publish a journal. Unlike the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which publishes Environmental Health Perspectives and has done more to undermine trust in science than any government website in history.
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of Health and Human Services, can't have been happy that one lost federal funding but, like with his solar panel fetish and hatred of affordable energy, he had to make concessions to Republicans to keep his job.
NOTES:
(1) Journals then began to charge government-funded researchers to publish but in 2025 the Trump administration declared that all taxpayer-funded research would be available to read free of charge, not just the NIH. No 12-month waiting period either.
(2) Laura Helmuth, Ph.D, took over as editor-in-chief of Scientific American and they began endorsing political candidates. Then, even though Biden stomped Obama and Clinton and every other candidate in history in the popular vote and defeated the Republican incumbent, that anyone at all voted Republican caused her to melt down.
(3) Conyers was an avowed socialist but even he'd tell Michigan voters this guy is radioactive. He's still going to win. Calling for fellow Democratic Senator John Fetterman, a supporter of Israel, to be murdered and displayed as "an ogre on a pike" made him more popular among modern Democrats. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is no better; given his treatment of other women in the opposing party, he will likely allege Dr. Overton slept with her residency bosses at Johns Hopkins.
