More than 1,100 experts have joined the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) in boycotting the medical journal Nutrients over ethical concerns.
The move follows a tepid response to a letter sent last year and signed by 800 doctors, nurses and scientists, several from Arizona.
Scientific and medical ethics generally hold that it’s more ethical to use human subjects, organs and tissues in research when possible.
Nutrient’s own guidelines say as much; but a PCRM review found one-fifth of the journal’s papers last year used animals — unnecessarily in almost every case.
The boycott includes Nutrients’ publisher, MDPI, which issues 420 journals and charges thousands per published article. That's a business model many worry discourages careful scrutiny of papers.
PCRM is also hoping to convince the publishers of MEDLINE, the leading bibliographic database for life sciences, to reconsider whether the journal belongs on its index.
