Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash
Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash

It’s been an unsettling time in academia following the start of the new US presidential administration. The onslaught of executive actions introduced over the past few months to impose significant funding cuts and workforce reductions on federal research agencies, take down public data, and prohibit the use of words related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has left many in the crosshairs grappling to wrap their heads around the implications of hastily issued government directives and policy changes.

While there are still more unknowns than answers, initiatives are forming to track, assess, and help individuals and organizations respond to threats to research, including the Declaration To Defend Research Against US Government Censorship (#DefendResearch declaration), which Scholastica has joined.

We’ve developed this blog post to help scholarly publishers and editors stay abreast of guidance and initiatives pertinent to their operations and communities in the below key areas:

We will update this post with new information as it becomes available (the last update was on May 1, 2025). We encourage you to share anything you think should be added in the comments section.

Responding to word bans

According to a recent report by the New York Times, the Trump administration has flagged over 190 words for federal agencies to “limit or avoid” in their communications and associated publications. This news follows reports of employees at the CDC and NIH being told to withdraw, retract, or remove themselves as authors from manuscripts submitted to journals that conflict with Trump’s executive orders on gender if they “cannot be adjusted to align with EO requirements,” per NPR.

If your journal is being affected by federal word bans, or if you’re concerned you may be in the future, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) have released recommendations on how to respond, including:

  • COPE’s position on “Banned terms in scholarly publications and restrictions on researchers’ activities” here
  • COPE’s position on “Editorial independence” here
  • COPE’s position on “handling censorship” here
  • ICMJE’s “Guidance Notice” here

COPE recently reiterated the above resources in a “statement on external influence on editorial decisions” available here.

Regarding requests to withdraw pending submissions or issue article retractions for research, COPE and ICMJE advise publishers and editors to adhere to established industry guidelines, including that coauthors should be aware of and agree with the decision to withdraw a manuscript and that retractions should be reserved for significant article errors or research misconduct, unless the personal safety of authors, reviewers, or editors is at risk. Both organizations provide recommendations for handling such extenuating circumstances in the above guides.

Overall, COPE asserts that “authors and editors are best placed to determine the appropriate language to be used in their respective fields” and that it supports the World Association of Medical Editors’ statement that “publication choices should not be swayed by external governmental policies, unless compliance with applicable laws is at stake.” COPE Chair Daniel Kulp reiterated that stance in a quote in a recent Science article regarding a letter the US Department of Justice sent to CHEST, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, asking for responses to questions about whether it allows for differing viewpoints and how it communicates if views expressed in the publication are “influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others” in reference to related US regulations. Kulp said COPE “fully support[s] the independence of journals from undue, external influences. However, journals should be aware of the risks associated with noncompliance, within the context of any existing law, so [seeking] legal advice is very highly recommended.”

For more information on the First Amendment rights of individuals and organizations, The National Coalition Against Censorship has a page on First Amendment FAQs here. Note: The page is meant to be an educational resource and does not constitute legal advice.

Facilitating data archiving and access

As reports of government directives around the prohibition of words in federal communication have surfaced, the scholarly community has also been working to keep track of the removal of public information and datasets from federal websites, with various organizations and individuals rushing to preserve lost information. A February article in the MIT Technology Review covering the scope of government website takedowns noted it includes “thousands of pages from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Office of Justice Programs.” The situation has led many to question the reliability of other US government-funded information sources, including the PubMed search engine (and MEDLINE and PMC, which feed into it), as discussed by Hilda Bastian in the PLOS blog.

Content and data takedowns have magnified the critical nature of ongoing initiatives within academia to promote digital archiving for preservation, as well as the FAIR Data Principles, to facilitate research integrity, transparency, and reproducibility. The FAIR Principles, short for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, were first published in Scientific Data in 2016, spurred by “an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data.” The Principles emphasize the importance of machine-readability of digital assets (data and metadata) to support online discovery.

Publishers and journals can help ensure content preservation by depositing the content they publish into secure long-term archives like Portico and CLOCKSS and encouraging authors to deposit the Version of Record or Authors Accepted Manuscript version of their articles into repositories (i.e., institutional, generalist, and domain/discipline-specific repositories) and preprint servers per the publisher/journal’s policies. Allowing authors to deposit the Version of Record as a form of Green OA will allow for more direct preservation of content and help expand its reach. As noted by Lisa Schiff in a recent Times Higher Education article, “Protecting your work – and your values – in US higher education,” it’s critical that authors archive not only new works but also vulnerable past publications, something journal publishers and editors can remind authors to do in their marketing and editorial communications.

To advance FAIR data, publishers and journals can encourage or consider requiring authors to archive their data in established general or domain/discipline-specific repositories, as appropriate. Recent examples of journals choosing to require data sharing include Environmental Research: Food Systems and Environmental Research: Climate, both published by IOP Publishing. You can learn more about why IOPP decided to require data sharing for those titles and how they developed guidelines with appropriate exclusion cases in this Research Information article.

In an interview with ZBW, Peter Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access at Harvard Library and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project at the Berkman Klein Center, emphasized the importance of ensuring content is archived via non-government websites:

“One of the most important actions is to host uncensored, open access OA research on non-government infrastructure. The US federal OA policies require deposit in agency-designated repositories, which are almost all hosted by the government itself. In better times, that was not a bad idea. But authors with texts, data, or code in those repositories should try to put copies in OA repositories beyond the government’s control, for example, in their university institutional repositories. They should also look for repositories hosted outside the US, like CERN’s Zenodo.”

As publishers and journals develop author archiving and data-sharing policies, they can ensure those policies are readily accessible to researchers and institutions by posting them on their websites (at the publisher and journal level) and registering new or updated policies with the Jisc Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa).

Among the primary barriers to expanding author self-archiving at present is the need for author education about its importance and available repository options. Publishers and journals can address this challenge by championing the value of data sharing and providing authors with resources to help them select appropriate repositories. AGU is an excellent example of how publishers can do this with a data and software policy page for authors that clearly explains its guidelines and offers repository selection resources, including a comparison chart of general repositories such as OSF from the Center for Open Science, Zenodo, Dryad, and Figshare and a list of domain/discipline-specific repositories. AGU also provides authors guidelines for writing data availability statements and data citations with examples.

Other steps publishers and journals can take to support data sharing among authors include:

  • Pointing authors toward resources for finding established repositories, such as FAIRsharing and re3data.org
  • Encouraging authors to use persistent identifiers, including signing up for ORCID and assigning DOIs to the data they archive
  • Exploring data-sharing incentive schemes such as the Open Science Badge system for authors from the Center for Open Science
  • Actively seeking feedback from authors on how to improve journal data-sharing guidelines (and iterating on your policy pages and related resources)
  • Striving to adhere to the FAIR principles in all aspects of your organization’s activities, including peer review processes

Supporting community mobilization and public education

As publishers and journals develop action plans to repel and respond to threats of censorship at their organizations, they also have the opportunity to support community mobilization initiatives like the Declaration To Defend Research Against US Government Censorship and facilitate efforts within their research communities and among the broader public to “condemn and resist the censorship of academic research” as the Declaration calls for, including by:

Engaging in political advocacy: Scholarly societies and institutions that publish research are engaging in political advocacy at the organizational level, such as institutions writing to members of Congress to warn against the risks of research funding cuts like the open letter to Congress from the Union of Concerned Scientists signed by more than 40 scientific societies. Other notable examples include:

  • “Cures in Crisis: What Gutting NIH Research Means for Americans with Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Other Diseases,” a congressional forum hosted by The American Association for Cancer Research on March 26 following AACR releasing a statement expressing its concerns about NIH funding cuts in February.
  • The American Society for Microbiology’s statements on NIH facility and administration cost cuts and federal workforce cuts and its resource page on “How to Take Your Advocacy Message to Congress” for ASM members and the broader public.
  • The American Mathematical Society “Take Action” page, which includes a call for visitors to contact ASM to learn more about Government Relations concerns for the mathematical community and sign up for their related mailing list.

Publishers can join these efforts by hosting awareness events and providing their communities with political advocacy resources, such as creating their own call scripts or promoting the #DefendResearch toolkit for contacting elected officials, which includes a link to find the phone numbers for federal, state, and local representatives, along with a call script and background information on current threats to research to help users make their case.

Promoting data rescue and tracking initiatives: As publishers establish forward-looking data archiving and sharing policies for their journals, they can also take steps to educate their communities about broader data preservation and at-risk data tracking initiatives like the:

  • Data Rescue Project: a coordinated effort among a group of organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and the Data Curation Network to “serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.”
  • Policy Commons 2025 Open Collection: an initiative to “rescue content from government organizations experiencing the removal of public information and data” led by Coherent Digital.
  • Internet Archive: a non-profit digital library that provides free access to digitized media (aka The Wayback Machine).
  • Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative: a project “to track ongoing changes to the accessibility of historical sources and how history is presented to the public” led by the Organization of American Historians.

Building trust in science: In the spirit of expanding research impact beyond academia, scholarly publishing organizations can also use their platforms to educate the public about the value of their research activities to build trust in science, a vital component of generating public support for efforts to protect research funding and access. The MIT Press and Aspen Institute Science & Society Program recently hosted a conference on the topic of building trust in science, which Jessica Hibbard, Senior Director of Communications & Insights at Luminary Labs, covered in a Luminary Labs blog post that highlights nine actionable takeaways, including:

  • Humanize science with personal connection and stories
  • Find and empower trusted messengers
  • Share messages that meet people where they are

In an interview with the Union of Concerned Scientists about the Declaration To Defend Research Against US Government Censorship, co-creator Lisa Schiff expressed why she believes engaging the public in science is more critical than ever. “Most scholars and others in the academy know what’s at stake, but we need support from the general public in order to mount an effective resistance to these actions,” said Schiff. Among the steps she and the Declaration team are taking include gathering testimonials from researchers about the impacts of censorship, which they plan to use in public awareness campaigns.

Co-creator of the #DefendResearch declaration, Alice Meadows, and nanochemist and science communicator Suze Kundu discussed strategies to turn threats to research into opportunities for public engagement in an article for The Scholarly Kitchen.

Advancing more equitable publishing systems and structures: In an article for The Scholarly Kitchen titled “DEI Under Threat: The Battle for Inclusive Research,” Charlie Rapple reminded readers that while DEI advances have been set back, “We have not lost the ability to examine the structures and systems that shape research, ensuring that they don’t perpetuate inequalities or reinforce exclusionary practices.” Among actionable steps publishers and journals can take to this end include encouraging diverse participation in peer review, offering support for authors who speak English as a second language, embracing initiatives to acknowledge researchers’ full range of contributions like CRediT, and participating in discussions about inequities in publishing and resource development like those organized by C4DISC.

Staying informed and connected to researcher communities

Finally, there’s a lot of information around developing research censorship concerns to keep up with right now. Various individuals and communities have launched initiatives to help make that easier, including a Wiki on Trump administration actions affecting open access initiatives from the Harvard Open Access Project run by Peter Suber (who also posts regular updates from his Bluesky account), as well as the various policy update trackers listed on the #DefendResearch declaration’s Take Action page under “Track.”

Multiple scholarly publishers have released statements regarding their stance on recent concerning executive orders affecting academia, including The BMJ, PLOS, JAMA, the European Journal of Public Health, and Emerald Publishing. Emerald, which was the first publisher to sign the #DefendResearch declaration, also released a series of downloadable assets organizations and individuals are encouraged to use for their own #DefendResearch advocacy efforts, including social media and email signature images, available on their #DefendResearch page.

Publishers and journals can stay connected to their communities by communicating how they are responding to political shifts and seeking input on how federal funding cuts and policy changes are impacting researchers to develop plans to help, such as the “Author/Researcher Survey” launched by Delta Think in partnership with over 20 scholarly societies.

While there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the state of research right now, what is clear is that publishers, journal editors, scholars, and other stakeholders are taking action to protect it, and maintaining open lines of communication is essential to expand those efforts.

UPDATE NOTE: This blog post was originally published on the 24th of April 2025 and updated on the 1st of May 2025 with additional information.