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For over 50 years, a top environmental-science journal has been an influential clearinghouse for research on how pollutants like lead, forever chemicals, and polluted air impact our lives. But in the coming months, the journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, will indefinitely pause the publication of new research due to budget cuts at the National Institutes of Health.
“It’s going to a real loss,” said deputy editor Dana Boyd Barr, a professor at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. “I didn’t think that environmental health was going to be something that was targeted for decreased funding.” But with the $6.8 billion in cuts to grants at the Health of Human Services, the journal will no longer have the budget needed to publish its free, open-access research. Nor will its sister journal, the Journal of Health and Pollution, which publishes research from regions of the world that don’t always get the funding for public-health studies.
Staffers say they were informed early in April that their modest budget for copyediting, editorial software, and printing was axed. Combined with a number of early retirements and buyouts among the federal workers tasked with aiding the journal’s publication, they say the journal could not continue to publish or accept new manuscript submissions for peer review. In a statement to the New York Times, editor Joel Kaufman said that they announced the pause because of a “lack of confidence” in their ability to produce top work following the budget cuts. Unless funding is restored, publication will cease within a few months.
“It’s been the premier journal that everyone wanted to publish in,” says Boyd Barr. “It was always the first place you went because you’ve got the most visibility there.”
“When I looked this morning, I found over 10,000 papers that were coming up as being published in Environmental Health Perspectives that have been used by the Environmental Protection Agency in terms of their decision-making,” says Sara Adar, an EHP deputy editor and professor of public health at the University of Michigan. “We surely have some key important papers that have come out, but I would actually say it’s the larger body of literature that this community is generating that’s critically important.”
The move comes within the Trump administration’s larger push, for the second time, to elevate industry concerns over the health of the public and the environment. As research goes, Trump officials appointed to lead Health and Human Services have also expressed their disdain for journals and their research. Last year, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin Makary claimed scientific journals were “gate-keeping” information, while HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview last year that he wanted to prosecute top medical journals. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science,” Kennedy said. (Of course, EHP has long published research that helps inform Kennedy’s perspective that Americans face a degraded health landscape that he wants to fix — with an agenda that includes the budget for such research.)
Today, HHS made two other announcements: It described the agency’s plan for the future of vaccine research and its focus on “whole-virus” vaccines, and it issued a large “gender-dysphoria report” that denounced “activist agendas.”
The Trump administration appears to be coming for other top journals. A draft HHS budget obtained by the New York Times shows that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could axe two major free journals: Emerging Infectious Diseases and Preventing Chronic Disease. Meanwhile, Ed Martin, the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. — who has ruthlessly been pursuing Trump’s agenda — has sent letters to publications including the New England Journal of Medicine accusing them of a political bias.
