Science Journal Editors Face Accountability

This quote by a journal editor comes from a news item in the Mar. 4 issue of Nature:¹

“Like everybody else, we are much more interested in other people’s accountability than we are in our own,” explains Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), who helped to draft the new code.  “Editors are perhaps some of the most unaccountable people in the world.”

The new code he speaks of is a draft of an ethical code of conduct for scientific publishing, which can be found on the website of the Committee on Publication Ethics.  The editor of Nature is “considering” the guidelines; other journals claim they already have independent review boards.  The article gives some examples of recent ethical violations by journal editors.  See also Nature Science Update (03/04/2004) for samples of misconduct; Jim Giles writes, “They lie, they cheat and they steal.  Judging by the cases described by a group of medical journal editors, scientists are no different from the rest of us.”

¹Jim Giles, “Medical editors urged to accept ethical code,” Nature 428, 5 (04 March 2004); doi:10.1038/428005a.

You thought that peer review kept science journals honest, and that science was a self-correcting process in which peer review kept bias out of the journals, didn’t you?  How come after centuries of science publishing, here in 2004 they are admitting that editors are some of the most unaccountable people in the world?
    Some of the proposed guidelines, if followed honestly, would put the Darwin Party out of business:

• Data Analysis:
• “The discussion section of a paper should mention any issues of bias which have been considered, and explain how they have been dealt with in the design and interpretation of the study.”
  Duties of Editors:
• “Studies that challenge previous work published in the journal should be given an especially sympathetic hearing.”
  How come Darwinians can speculate freely beyond the evidence, but rebuttals from ID scientists are systematically excluded? (see 05/13/2003 headline, for example).  How come pro-Darwin book reviews are published, but only negative reviews are published of intelligent design books, if at all?
• “Studies reporting negative results should not be excluded.”
  OK, let’s publish some of the many dates that conflict with the standard geological column.
• “All original studies should be peer reviewed before publication, taking into full account possible bias due to related or conflicting interests.”
  Does philosophical materialism count as bias?
  Media Relations:
• “Authors approached by the media should give as balanced an account of their work as possible, ensuring that they point out where evidence ends and speculation begins.”
  This one guideline alone would put the Darwinian just-so storytelling enterprise out of business.

COPE says that “These guidelines are intended to be advisory rather than prescriptive, and to evolve over time.”  So who or what is going to hold the editor of Nature accountable?  Sales records?  Guidelines might evolve by intelligent design, but if ethics evolve, they are not ethics.
    Speaking of bias, did you know that the journal Nature was originally formed to be a propaganda outlet for the Darwinians?  Look at what Janet Browne wrote in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002):

The Reader [a first-attempt Darwin mouthpiece] was to expire in 1867.  Not long afterwards, Norman Lockyear, one of its editors, put up the idea of founding a periodical which they would call Nature, to be owned and published by Alexander Macmillan, a journal that would provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge.  Lockyear brought Nature into existence in November 1869, fronted by an introduction by Huxley (“as if written by the maddest English scholar,” said Darwin indulgently).  To command the periodical market was a shrewd tactic in any contested cultural arena but one as yet little exploited in science, and while Lockyear was never a member of the X Club [a group of radical antireligious naturalists and Darwin-supporters, founded by Huxley] he displayed similar strong, progressive liberal opinions.  Far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived, born and raised to serve polemic purpose.  In the first year of its existence, there were six or seven articles urging Darwin’s scheme, two of which were written by Darwin himself.  Darwin became a lifelong subscriber, claiming he got a kind of “satisfaction” in reading articles he could not understand.
(p. 248)
[Otto] Zacharias also asked if he could use Darwin’s name on a new journal he wished to start in Germany, called Darwinia…. Such journals, as they all recognized, played a fundamental role in distributing evolutionary ideas.  The story of Nature’s conception in 1869 was prime evidence of the value of having a tightly-controlled, well-distributed mouthpiece…. One of the first journals to take up Darwin’s views in Germany had been the weekly magazine Ausland (“Abroad”), a heady mix of biology and society, pumped up with a stream of articles from Haeckel and other evolutionists.  During the Franco-Prussian War, the editor, Friedrich von Hellwald, claimed Darwinism as proof that warfare between nations was a natural law, a standard view of the time that did not prevent his journal’s expiry a few years afterwards.
(pp. 438-439).

These and many other tidbits from Browne’s book reveal that the Darwinian revolution was largely a propaganda coup.  It would have been more honest for Nature to have been named Naturalism.