Diabetes Care editors halt peer review, calling it a strike against the American Diabetes Association

Four editors of the American Diabetes Association's flagship journal, Diabetes Care, have stopped reviewing manuscripts. Editor-in-chief Steven Kahn, one of five members ousted from the ADA's June meeting in New Orleans for distributing a critical editorial on federal research funding cuts, calls the action what it is: "a strike against a major corporation."

The withdrawal, announced on LinkedIn on Thursday, is the latest move in a fight that began when ADA leadership removed five members from the group's annual Scientific Sessions in June. According to STAT News, the four editors joining Kahn in withholding reviews are Cheryl Anderson of UC San Diego, John Buse of the University of North Carolina, and Elizabeth Selvin of Johns Hopkins.

The triggering document is a June editorial in Diabetes Care titled "Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle...", which criticized federal cuts to research funding. The editorial's authors had distributed copies at the New Orleans meeting, and ADA removed them from the conference the same day. The removals, first reported by STAT in June, set off a summer of internal protest.

The September action targets peer review rather than membership rolls. The American Diabetes Association, founded in 1940, is the largest professional society focused on diabetes in the United States. Diabetes Care is one of two flagship research journals it publishes, and the journal's standing depends on a largely unpaid workforce: senior researchers who read, critique, and recommend acceptance or rejection of submitted papers. Without reviewers, submissions stall, publication slows, and the journal's impact factor, the citation-weighted score that signals influence to authors and institutions, drifts.

Kahn told STAT the boycott is a refusal to subsidize leadership the membership no longer recognizes. "This is a boycott by members of a nonprofit organization, where the leadership of the organization is operating like a corporate board, rather than leadership of a membership organization, and the membership has said, 'We've had enough,'" he said.

The ADA, asked for comment, sent a single sentence: "We are aware of the efforts taking place. We remain focused on serving the millions of people counting on us to deliver on our mission."

The dispute has three unresolved fronts: the June expulsions themselves, the ADA leadership's response to them, and a summer-long internal review the association opened after the New Orleans meeting. None has produced a public resolution. The journal-level withdrawal adds a fourth. The question of whether the society can continue to publish a top-tier research title while a critical mass of its editorial board refuses to participate in its core function is now in play.

Peer review at this scale has no easy replacement. Journals can solicit reviews from outside the boycott coalition, but the named editors sit at the center of the U.S. diabetes research network, and the manuscript queue at Diabetes Care depends on relationships they control. If the boycott holds through the next submission cycle, the journal's publication lag will become visible to authors, institutions, and the funders whose grant outputs flow through its pages.

The action also changes the working definition of a professional medical society. Members pay dues. Journals publish under their names. Conferences fill under their banners. When the June-expelled members become the September-withholding editors, the line between member protest and institutional sabotage blurs. ADA's roughly 50,000 professional members are left to decide which side of that line they are on.

Diabetes Care's next issue closes in October. If the reviewers stay out, the manuscripts filed in September will be the first to stall.