“It Starts with Censorship”: An Interview with Science Defender Lisa Schiff
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Almost the moment President Trump took the oath of office, the attacks on science, data, and science-based policies began. The new administration halted public health communication, upended science advisory boards and deleted environmental justice data. Fortunately, as quickly as these attacks emerged, leading minds in the science community came together to challenge them. One way that researchers are pushing back against the Trump administration’s abuses is the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship.
Co-authored by Lisa Schiff, Alice Meadows, Catherine Mitchell, Sara Rouhi and Peter Suber in their capacity as private citizens, the Declaration has now been signed by more than 100 organizations and more than 4,000 scholars, researchers and experts.
I talked with Dr. Lisa Schiff this week about the Declaration and how the science community should push back against the Trump administration’s attacks. As the Associate Director for the Publishing, Archives, and Digitization group at the California Digital Library at the University of California, Schiff is keenly aware of the importance of unfettered academic inquiry, access to publications and data, transparency, and collaboration to researchers—and the danger of government interference with science. (The thoughts and perspectives she shared below reflect her own personal views, and are not meant to represent those of her institution.)
PP: Can you tell me about the genesis of the declaration? What inspired you and your co-drafters to develop it?
LS: The Declaration was drafted and released in direct response to the Trump Administration’s first censorship acts beginning late January 2025, including the requirement in February that publications associated with the CDC had to be retracted or paused if they included any “forbidden” words. As a librarian concerned with intellectual freedom, as an academic librarian who has been involved with open access publishing for decades, as someone with my own research and publication record, and as a citizen of the world who benefits from the ability of scientists to freely conduct research, I was both furious and alarmed at this governmental overreach. I felt an immediate, strong, and very public response was necessary from the scholarly community across disciplines, institutions, and positions in the ecosystem–all the more so given the complete silence, at that point, on the part of higher education institutional leadership. I channeled my anger into a draft statement that I shared with a handful of others within the scholarly communication space who I knew felt similarly, and together, we crafted what became the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship.
PP: How has the Declaration been received broadly? What is included in this Declaration?
LS: As of April 13th, over 4,200 individuals have signed as well as over 100 organizations, including Emerald Publishing, the Association of University Presses, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Project Censored, Open Library of Humanities, the Library Publishing Coalition, Scholastica, Directory of Open Access Books, World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation, OAPEN Foundation, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and, most recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The Declaration asks people to not only sign, but to take at least one other action: 1) Supporting instances of resistance to U.S. government censorship; 2) Promoting venues for scholars to share, safeguard, and preserve their work, beyond the reach of censorship; 3) Participating in efforts to track and record instances of U.S. government censorship; and 4) Sharing the Declaration broadly and encouraging individuals and organizations to sign and support it.
PP: What is your goal with getting signatories and circulation of the declaration?
LS: Our ultimate aim is, of course, to halt and roll back the Trump Administration’s expanding censorship efforts, but our more immediate goal is to raise awareness of this censorship and build resistance against it. We believe that a vocal and shared effort denouncing censorship will both inspire others to act and also provide leverage to use with elected officials, leaders of higher education institutions, and others, so that we can end this assault on academic freedom and our national research infrastructure.
We’ve identified some key steps along our path towards both the immediate and ultimate goals. The first is to increase understanding of the dangers of censorship and the need to defend research. Most scholars and others in the academy know what’s at stake, but we need support from the general public in order to mount an effective resistance to these actions. In the midst of the broad chaos that the Trump administration is generating, we are working to get media coverage of the Declaration as a way to highlight the ways in which censorship is happening and the threat it poses to the health and well-being of the American public and people around the world. Mentions in Nature, Scientific American, and elsewhere have been a great start, but we’re looking for more.
Our second goal, and really the original motivation behind the Declaration, is to connect people and organizations on this issue in a visible way. We want to provide a shared platform for a collective denunciation of censorship. We want to connect people who are equally alarmed, and cut through any sense of fear and isolation in order to help them feel more empowered to speak up. It is so often the case that people wait to act until they are asked, or they take an action once they see someone else take it first. Signing a declaration might seem like a small step, but because it can spur a second, third, or fourth step, it can be a quite powerful start to something bigger.
Our third goal, and this is where we are starting to pivot, is to influence elected officials and other decision-makers who have more of a direct ability to intervene and stop the censorship. We are gathering testimonials from researchers about the impact of censorship on their work and on their communities, and we intend to use those stories as part of a toolkit we are assembling, with a script and supporting background information, to help people effectively contact elected officials to demand that they intervene. We expect to have those resources ready to share soon, both on our website (www.defendresearch.org) and with other organizations working to mobilize this kind of direct action.
PP: What kinds of censorship are you seeing from the Trump administration’s second term? Can you share a few examples of impacts on research and communication?
LS: We are seeing multiple forms of censorship, from outright bans on terminology to defunding areas of research that the Trump administration has antipathy towards. For instance, the CDC’s forbidden word list includes the term “LGBT”, meaning that the needs of people from a vast, complex set of communities will not be considered in this agency’s work to understand and prevent harm from diseases. Just last week, the Department of Agriculture sent out its own list of prohibited terms, including seemingly apolitical phrases like “rural water.” But of course access to water, and the competing interests of agricultural, commercial, and household needs, is a growing issue of concern with climate change, which the Administration is intent on dismissing. While not outright forbidding certain words, the NSF infamously has a long list of terms that will trigger a review, including “women” and “disability.” This practice will obviously slow down–and perhaps stop altogether–grant support for work focused on people and concerns that the administration seems to have no positive interest in. Finally, these forms of censorship, by virtue of creating an environment of intimidation, can also result in research suppression and anticipatory self-censorship, as with this instance of a scholar who has withdrawn a paper on evolution out of fear of deportation.
Thinking beyond a strict definition of censorship quickly reveals other acts by this administration that accomplish the same aim of eliminating research and access to knowledge, such as distorting research by requiring a specific outcome tied to a political agenda. An example of this came in early April with the administration’s directive that the NIH support work investigating “regret” on the part of individuals who have transitioned from their birth-assigned gender. This study is clearly designed to disrupt this area of healthcare and is part of a larger effort to eliminate any activity, anywhere, related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including preventing access to existing scholarly works on race and gender, as with the recent removal of those materials from libraries in Mississippi.
Perhaps the ultimate form of censorship is defunding and eliminating federally supported research on topics the administration wants to minimize or pretend don’t exist. Grants were just eliminated for an initiative in San Diego that was building up capacity to monitor wastewater for the presence of infectious diseases like measles, in order to prevent their spread. This shift, combined with a suppression of research that argued for a vaccine campaign to combat the growing measles outbreak in the U.S., seems likely to ensure the spread of that disease and lead to additional deaths. Similarly silenced through elimination was a group within HHS that produced data related to poverty. These data were, in turn, used to determine eligibility requirements for programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to help low-income families get food, so U.S. families may also experience increased hunger as a result of censorship.
PP: What is the academic and science publishing community doing to defend the right to free speech, to publish and communicate research findings, and peer and public access and availability to information?
LS: The response within the academic and science publishing community has been mixed, with some inspiring highs and some worrisome lows. Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Emerald Publishing, the American Association of University Professors, and the Association of University Presses have been at the forefront with high-profile, vocal stances against censorship and in defense of researchers and the U.S. research infrastructure. A number of scholarly societies have spoken out including the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, who issued their own joint statement against censorship. Many journal editors have also published statements. At the forefront, though, have been faculty coming together within and across institutions, with statements, petitions, and lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to control their speech on campus. These efforts are inspiring and motivating!
What has been frustrating and concerning is the almost absolute silence on the part of higher education leadership in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks. To date, the exceptions can be counted on one hand: Princeton, Brown, Wesleyan, Mount Holyoke College, and most recently, Harvard. No doubt much lobbying and many conversations are happening privately, but this extraordinary time calls for public action and public solidarity. Institutions working individually behind the scenes prevent the higher education community from joining together and forming a more powerful public force. Again, let’s take inspiration from faculty, like the Northwestern law clinic faculty lawsuit that stopped a congressional investigation and the Rutgers Academic Senate who are calling for mutual aid across the Big Ten Academic Alliance. It would be great to see academic leadership taking such steps, but in the end I believe it will be the faculty, students, and staff—and the organizations they are part of, like UCS—who will be the ones publicly fighting for censorship to be halted and rolled back.
PP: What structures, policies, support can scientific societies, academic institutions and publishing companies put in place now to safeguard our right to communicate and access scientific information into the future?
LS: This feels like such an exceptionally dangerous time, with a breathtaking scope and scale of destruction. But I’m finding it useful to reflect on what isn’t exceptional about this moment, and to squarely face the generative forces that have combined to create the current conditions. We experienced a more restricted version of this administration’s efforts to subvert research during Trump’s first term with the constant undermining of science in addressing COVID. The prior attacks on immigrants, fomentation of violence towards people of color, threats to the LGBTQ+ community, and support for white nationalism are now finding expression in the various forms of censorship I mentioned earlier. Without a doubt the decades-long effort to impose censorship in public libraries is directly connected to what we are seeing within the research environment. And Project 2025, the literal blueprint for much of the assault on our research and knowledge infrastructure, was proudly in plain sight for quite awhile.
So the bellwether warnings have been there for quite some time, but unfortunately not enough of us were listening. Now that we are listening, we have to consider both the present and the future. In addition to resistance efforts to protect what we can and prevent the greatest harm, looking towards what we want to build towards is critical. No recipe or formula exists, but there are both immediate and long-term changes to make.
In the short term, the scholarly publishing community should make strong and clear statements that they will not enforce or tolerate censorship of research and will advocate on behalf of scholars when they become aware of such activity. Statements issued by joint bodies are important, but statements issued by every publisher and editorials by every journal would send an even stronger message. Such statements could also reassure scholars outside of the U.S., some of whom have voiced reluctance to submit articles to U.S.-based journals and expressed concerns about censorship compromising the ability of U.S.-based colleagues to conduct quality peer reviews.
Another short-term step would be to ensure U.S.-based publications are also available in repositories outside of the U.S., both for long-term preservation and also for immediate access to address situations like the one in Mississippi that I mentioned previously, where published work is removed. This action would be similar to the Data Rescue Project and other efforts to create web archives of agency sites with links to publications.
Even in the midst of this crisis, it’s important to focus on the future. I think the most important change is for the scholarly community—researchers, librarians, students, and staff—to have a greater connection with the general public, to bring the shared work of the academy and its benefits more squarely into civic spaces, following the prompt of Dr. Neil A. Lewis, Jr. who describes universities as “palaces for the people.” We can talk about what we’re involved with and why it matters at family gatherings, to someone in line at the grocery store, or when waiting to board an airplane. We can remind ourselves that letters to editors in local newspapers still get read in many communities, and that those are places to share these stories. In other words, more of us can take the time to engage in just the kinds of public facing activities that UCS is supporting.
A second important change is that we can no longer pretend that our institutions reside outside the realm of politics, or that the existing political relationships and structures are sufficiently strong to protect large-scale public goods such as higher education and a national research infrastructure. Those of us within academic institutions need to play more of a vocal constructive-critic role to try to hold our leaders accountable to the stated missions and values of our institutions. It also means that more of us who engage in or support research and higher education need to be part of formal political processes. We need representation on school boards, library commissions, and public utility oversight committees. We need to become state representatives and senators, governors and congresspeople. There has long been a recognized need for more scientists in D.C.; today we’re seeing more clearly than ever how essential that is.
Ultimately there is no single solution, but there are innumerable small actions that in combination can make a difference. Everyone–individuals and organizations alike–should find something that matters to them and just do it. Sign the Declaration, submit a testimonial about impact, communicate with elected officials. This is where we are starting, and we hope many will join us.