US Chaos and Open Science - Google Groups

"Had an interesting thing happen today with a response from a potential peer reviewer who declined to do a peer review because of concerns about US government oversight.

We carry out an open, named peer review at GigaScience, and had asked a researcher at a government research center (who has peer reviewed for us before), to review a new paper. The potential reviewer wrote back that in the current uncertainty in the US, as an employee of the government, he/she did not feel that he/she could agree to do an open peer review.

While there are no specific bans on releasing information by researchers in government organizations, there seems to be a sense of uncertainty about participating in open science activities. 

Open peer review, of course, already has an underlying fear of reprisal of some sort from grumpy authors who's paper was rejected- but I had never heard it in the sense of a generalized fear of government reprisals.

This was very chilling to me- that researchers are considering what information they are willing to share out of concern of a government response...."