Scientific paper preprint sites censor submissions

medRxiv and arXiv consistently reject papers that challenge the 'official' covid narrative

The whole point of research paper preprint sites like medRxiv and arXiv is that they are supposed to enable researchers to publicise their work prior to any formal review process. It used to be the case that, providing the material passed automated checks for plagiarism and offensive language, then it would be published within a couple of days.

But all that changed in the covid era. We have reported many times how all of our covid papers, that in any way challenge the ‘official narrative’, are now routinely rejected by both medRxiv and arXiv (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here). As the twitter post below makes clear, this censorship is now openly stated by medRxiv:

By way of our most recent example, we submitted this paper containing a detailed analysis of the latest ONS vaccine mortality surveillance data to medRxiv on 9 November 2022. This is the response we got on 10 November 2022.

We regret to inform you that your manuscript is inappropriate for posting. medRxiv is intended for research papers, and our screening process determined that this manuscript fell short of that description.

At the same time (9 November 2022) we submitted the paper to arXiv. As is usual with arXiv we received a reply within hours stating that the paper would be published at 00.00 the next day, but (again as usual) this did not happen, and the paper appeared as ‘pending’ on the arXiv dashboard. When this happens, we always know it will be rejected by the censors. Often, they never reply at all, and it is left pending forever or is simply removed from the dashboard. However, this time we eventually got this email from arXiv Support <jira@arxiv-org.atlassian.net> on 9 December 2022

Thank you for submitting your work to arXiv. We regret to inform you that arXiv’s moderators have determined that your submission will not be accepted and made public on[ |http://arxiv.org][arXiv.org|http://arxiv.org]. Our moderators have determined that your submission is on a topic not covered by arXiv or that the intended audience for your work is not a community we currently serve.

So, they rejected the paper as being out of scope. Which is curious given the enormous number of papers they have on covid data analytics (including a few of ours before we were writing stuff that challenged ‘the narrative’). But what is particularly curious in this case is that just 2 days earlier (7 December 2022) we got the following rejection (after several weeks) for a paper that focused on one particular part of the paper they rejected on 9 December, namely the statistical implications of the different estimates of proportion unvaccinated:

Thank you for submitting your work to arXiv. We regret to inform you that arXiv’s moderators have determined that your submission will not be accepted and made public on[ |http://arxiv.org][arXiv.org|http://arxiv.org]. Our moderators determined that your submission does not contain sufficient original or substantive scholarly research and is not of interest to arXiv.

So, even though both papers addressed the same topic, one was rejected on the basis that it was not sufficiently original, while the other was rejected on the basis it was out of scope.

This activity is a variant on a theme. Look at what happens on Wikipedia:

How Wikipedia defames and delegitimizes anybody raising concerns against the WHO narrative on Covid

Norman was interviewed by Bret Weinstein, on the Dark Horse podcast about this experience:

Fortunately (for the time being at least) it seems ResearchGate has not been censoring papers on covid and hence we have had no difficulty in putting our papers there.

A full list of our covid papers can be found here.