BMJ: Acting on historically offensive content in BMJ’s archive, 2022

“Exploratory work at BMJ suggests that harmful content falls into four broad categories: offensive language (such as racial abuse), offensive views (language that may not be explicitly derogatory but the theme and tone of which would now be recognised as unacceptable); harmful science (research that harms certain groups); and misused content (language or an article that is not offensive but is used to support a harmful agenda) (fig 1). This categorisation is a first attempt and may help other editors and publishers to categorise content, and to decide whether action such as correction or retraction is needed.”

(No comment needed.)

https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1829

 

I hope that harmful content is not removed from the BMJ Archive. Imagine it's 100 years in the future and some sick people are still having problems with disbelief and disrespect. If the "harmful content" from medical archives is deleted then it also deletes the history of the experiences groups of sick people of all kinds may have suffered.

 

Indeed. In any case, I suspect they don’t consider what they have published on ME/CFS to meet any of their four criteria — no worries that it shall be pruned.

 

They should try rereading their 1970 editoral on McEvedy and Beard.

But on no account should it be lost to the record.

 

Me neither. I might support it being labelled as out of date, superseded, etc, so that it isn't quoted in current work except as an example of how or why not to do something, but I suppose that's not as easy to do as it might sound.

It's really important to be able to see the journey that science has been on and is still travelling, though, in the same way it's useful to be able to track societal attitudes. They change beyond all recognition in less than a lifetime, as anyone who now watches certain 1970s TV shows can see. We sometimes need to be reminded quite how awful some of it was, and why it's not a good idea to go back over the same ground.

 

I suspect they would keep before and after records. I think the easiest solution, if they do want to do this, is to retain both copies and allow both to be accessible.

That way, you're not continuing to perpetuate the harmful stuff in science while also allowing others to see where that harmful stuff came from.

That seems the easiest, and most practical, way to do that. And they could make it as simple as uploading the older stuff to the Internet Archive so there's always a backup copy (if they don't have the capacity to store it themselves, though I think they will).

Realistically, any archive they have will also log the changes made. So I think it very unlikely the outdated stuff will be gone. It'll just be moved. That's what an archive is.