Elsevier is the science publishing company that owns the journal Social Science Research. Elsevier has billions of dollars in revenue every year.

Through a combination of corporate greed and disdain for gay people’s rights — as well as a CORRUPT publication process — Elsevier enabled the publication of Mark Rengerus’s scientifically invalid, anti-gay study, and another study by Loren Marks, propagandistically twinned to the Regnerus study.

The Regnerus study was funded for a total of $785,000, mainly through the anti-gay-rights Witherspoon Institute’s program for Marriage, Family and Democracy. That Witherspoon program’s Director is W. BRADFORD WILCOX.

Wilcox is an EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER of Elsevier’s journal Social Science Research, which published Regnerus and Marks. The Regnerus study was accepted for publication on a suspicious rush schedule; the peer reviewers had conflicts of interest; none were same-sex parenting topic experts. Wilcox was a peer reviewer for one of the studies. His Witherspoon Institute is promoting the twinned studies in anti-gay-rights contexts, including through a stand-alone site it created for them.

What’s more is that Wilcox is a paid Regnerus study consultant. He “assists” Regnerus with “data analysis.” That means every time there’s an opportunity to monkey around with the data, in ways that are being hidden from the public, Wilcox can “assist” Regnerus to do that monkeying around with data, in ways that make gays look worse, and the public has no way of fact-checking what Regnerus and his anti-gay-rights funder did while monkeying around with the data.

When over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s sent journal editor James Wright and Darren Sherkat a letter complaining that the Regnerus study does not support its conclusions, and complaining also about the suspicious publication process, Wright went through the motions of a sham “audit,” that turned up a lot of shockingly unprofessional behavior at the journal but held nobody accountable for it. Wright understands perfectly well all of the conflicts of interest in this that his editorial board member Wilcox has as one of Regnerus’s funders, and as a paid study consultant promoting the study in anti-gay-rights political contexts, yet WRIGHT DID NOT DIVULGE THAT INFORMATION IN THE SHAM “AUDIT.” The information about Wilcox’s relation to Regnerus, and Elsevier’s journal Social Science Research had to be dug out by investigative reporters. Nobody at Elsevier wanted the public to know about Wilcox’s improper roles in the publication of Regnerus. In fact, they did everything they could to hide Wilcox’s roles in publishing Regnerus.

Elsevier must now retract Wilcox’s and Regnerus’s scientifically invalid, gay-bashing garbage from publication immediately. If it must be republished in the future, put it through valid peer review first. We will not stand silently by, allowing a science publisher’s greed to undermine – at our expense — the trust on which science is based.

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