The journal will focus on replication, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will start a new journal that will help change the culture of science, the agency’s director said in a newly released interview.
“The NIH can stand up and will stand up a journal where these replication results can be published and made searchable in an easy way,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a four-hour podcast interview with Andrew Huberman, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, released on June 9.
Bhattacharya said he envisions people being able to see summaries of similar papers that looked at the same questions.
“A scientific journal put out by the NIH, a high-profile journal will then make publishing replication work a high-profile scientific, high-prestige scientific activity,” he added later.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that federal scientists would likely be told to stop publishing in medical journals and, if that happened, the NIH would launch journals that would publish the scientists’ research.
Kennedy said that the existing journals have problems such as not publishing all of the data that underpins studies, while Bhattacharya said the journals will not publish replication research. Both officials have said they want the government to devote resources to replication, with Kennedy estimating that 20 percent of the NIH budget be designated for that purpose.
Replication is the process of taking a study, repeating it, and seeing if the results are the same.
While some scientists conduct meta-analyses, or studies that sum up existing literature on a topic—which could be considered a form of replication—“it’s really difficult to make a career out of doing replication work as a general matter,” Bhattacharya said in the podcast.
Scientists cannot at present earn large grants from the NIH for such work, which means the scientists cannot receive tenure at a top university, he said. That dissuades young scientists from focusing on replication work.
“We don’t reward it. The NIH doesn’t reward it,” Bhattacharya said. “That will change.”
The new journal will also publish negative results, or when scientists try to replicate a study and fail.
