Erratum: Retraction of the landmark glyphosate safety publication by Williams, Kroes and Munro (2000) should be reversed.
[This corrects the article on p. 1107 in vol. 25, PMID: 42517087.].
Published Erratum↗
Biomedical subjects
John DeSesso
Publications and source records attributed to John DeSesso.
Retraction of the landmark glyphosate safety publication by Williams, Kroes and Munro (2000) should be reversed.
The decision by the co-Editor-in-Chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Prof. Martin van den Berg, to retract the 2000 review article by Williams, Kroes, and Munro has elicited widespread criticism within the scientific community. Issued in late 2025, the retraction decision cites procedural concerns including potential ghostwriting, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and omission of certain unpublished studies, invoking Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines despite lacking evidence of fraud or scientific flaws. This editorial argues that the retraction decision involves editorial overreach and misapplication of the guidelines. The alleged omissions stemmed from proprietary data access limitations that were disclosed in the original paper. Subsequent reviews by several independent expert panels and regulatory authorities with access to all glyphosate data, including the studies cited by the retracting editor, reached similar conclusions. Claims of ghostwriting were previously investigated and found lacking, including a declaration by EFSA as to the clarity of the conflict disclosures. The retraction's timing, reliance on litigation documents, and apparent biases that were not disclosed in the retraction notice raise questions of ideological interference. Absent substantive rebuttals based on scientific merit rather than speculative claims of inappropriate authorship and data access, this retraction decision sets a dangerous precedent for retroactive censorship, potentially chilling beneficial industry-academic collaborations and eroding trust in the integrity of scientific publishing. With the strongest conviction, we assert that retracting a paper without scientific flaws isn't protection-it is censorship. We therefore call for the immediate reversal of this flawed and unjustified retraction to preserve trust in peer-reviewed literature.
COPE↗
Framework for use of toxicity screening tools in context-based decision-making.
One of the principal applications of toxicology data is to inform risk assessments and support risk management decisions that are protective of human health. Ideally, a risk assessor would have available all of the relevant information on (a) the toxicity profile of the agent of interest; (b) its interactions with living systems; and (c) the known or projected exposure scenarios: to whom, how much, by which route(s), and how often. In practice, however, complete information is seldom available. Nonetheless, decisions still must be made. Screening-level assays and tools can provide support for many aspects of the risk assessment process, as long as the limitations of the tools are understood and to the extent that the added uncertainty the tools introduce into the process can be characterized and managed. Use of these tools for decision-making may be an end in itself for risk assessment and decision-making or a preliminary step to more extensive data collection and evaluation before assessments are undertaken or completed and risk management decisions made. This paper describes a framework for the application of screening tools for human health decision-making, although with some modest modification, it could be made applicable to environmental settings as well. The framework consists of problem formulation, development of a screening strategy based on an assessment of critical data needs, and a data analysis phase that employs weight-of-evidence criteria and uncertainty analyses, and leads to context-based decisions. Criteria for determining the appropriate screening tool(s) have been identified. The choice and use of the tool(s) will depend on the question and the level of uncertainty that may be appropriate for the context in which the decision is being made. The framework is iterative, in that users may refine the question(s) as they proceed. Several case studies illustrate how the framework may be used effectively to address specific questions for any endpoint of toxicity.
Animals↗