On the morning of Friday, June 5, 2026, security officers and, according to multiple local and trade press accounts, New Orleans police removed five physicians and researchers from the convention center hosting the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) 86th Scientific Sessions. Their offense: handing out reprints of an editorial published in Diabetes Care, the ADA’s own flagship journal, warning that Trump administration cuts to federal biomedical research funding threatened the diabetes research pipeline. Two months on, the incident has metastasized into a governance crisis that now centers on a question research administrators know well — who actually controls a society-owned journal’s editorial decisions, and what happens when a publisher’s own leadership decides it doesn’t like what its editors want to say.
What happened in New Orleans
The editorial at the center of the incident ran in Diabetes Care on April 29, 2026. Among its authors was Steven Kahn, director of the University of Washington Diabetes Research Center and, at the time, editor-in-chief of the journal itself. On the first morning of the Scientific Sessions, Kahn and colleagues — including Justin Ryder of Northwestern University — began distributing reprints of the piece to attendees inside the convention center. Security staff and police intervened, attempted to confiscate the reprints and attendee lanyards, and escorted the group outside; several later re-entered and continued distributing copies, according to contemporaneous reporting from NOLA.com, Inside Higher Ed and The Scientist.
ADA leadership defended the removal at the time by citing the organization’s obligations as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to maintain a nonpartisan environment, and said the distribution had not been authorized and violated the meeting’s code of conduct. The explanation did not settle the matter. Within days, STAT reported that roughly 45 former ADA presidents and board chairs had sent the organization a letter of disapproval, and a Change.org petition calling for accountability drew thousands of signatures. ADA chief executive Charles "Chuck" Henderson apologized for the removal in the days that followed and pledged to rebuild trust. Two officers of the association — Mark Atkinson, who chaired the Scientific Sessions Planning Committee, and Jennifer Green, the ADA’s president-elect and a Duke Clinical Research Institute physician — subsequently resigned from their positions.
Then the ADA blocked its own journal from covering the story
The apology did not end the crisis; it deferred it. Diabetes Care‘s editors prepared an editorial and a set of firsthand accounts from the researchers who were removed, intending to publish them in the journal. According to STAT’s July 16 reporting, ADA leadership blocked that publication, citing an “ongoing review” as the reason for the delay. The accounts eventually surfaced anyway — not in the journal, but on the open-access repository Zenodo, as “Community Voices: On the Events of the American Diabetes Association 86th Scientific Sessions.” For a scholarly society whose journal exists to publish scientific and clinical findings on the society’s own condition of focus, preventing that journal from publishing an account of events that happened at the society’s own meeting is a direct editorial-independence problem, not a communications one.
Members escalate: an open letter and a non-answer
By late July, member patience had run out. In an open letter to the ADA Board of Directors, more than 200 ADA members demanded four things: the resignation of CEO Charles Henderson and Chief Scientific and Medical Officer Rita Kalyani; an independent investigation into the events of the Scientific Sessions; a full apology to the five researchers who were removed; and “the restoration of editorial independence at Diabetes Care.” The letter noted that more than 45 days had passed since the New Orleans incident with no meaningful board action, per STAT’s July 28 coverage. The ADA’s response, delivered the same week, asked members for patience while a report was being prepared — without committing to any of the four demands or announcing further leadership changes.
On July 31, Retraction Watch co-founders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky wrote in STAT that the ADA had abandoned a hard-won reputation. In 2015, the ADA had refused to back down from a defamation suit brought by Brazilian researcher Mario Saad over findings published in its journals, and Marcus and Oransky gave the association their inaugural “Doing the Right Thing” award for it in 2017. Their July 31 piece argued that an organization once willing to defend its journals against legal pressure was now unwilling to defend them against its own leadership’s discomfort with a politically inconvenient editorial.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 29, 2026 | Editorial on federal research-funding cuts published in Diabetes Care. |
| June 5, 2026 | Five researchers, including Diabetes Care editor-in-chief Steven Kahn, removed by security and police from the ADA Scientific Sessions in New Orleans for distributing reprints. |
| Early-mid June 2026 | Public backlash: ~45 former ADA presidents/board chairs send a disapproval letter; CEO Charles Henderson apologizes; Mark Atkinson and Jennifer Green resign their ADA leadership roles. |
| Mid-July 2026 | Diabetes Care editors’ planned editorial and firsthand accounts of the incident are blocked from publication by ADA leadership, citing an ongoing review; accounts are later posted to Zenodo instead. |
| Late July 2026 | More than 200 ADA members send an open letter demanding resignations, an independent investigation, an apology, and restored editorial independence at the journal. |
| July 28, 2026 | ADA asks members for patience while it prepares a report; does not address the specific demands. |
| July 31, 2026 | STAT opinion piece by Retraction Watch’s founders argues the ADA has abandoned its 2015 record of defending editorial independence. |
Why this matters beyond one professional society
Editorial independence is a named position of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): a journal’s accept/reject/revise decisions should rest on scholarly merit alone, insulated from the commercial, political or personal interests of whoever owns or publishes the journal — see CASRAI’s guide to COPE’s guidelines for how that principle is meant to operate in practice. Most large journals are owned by commercial publishers, university presses, or independent societies with governance structures built specifically to separate the editor-in-chief’s decisions from the parent organization’s institutional interests. Diabetes Care is a case where the publisher and the subject of the controversial content are the same entity: the ADA is simultaneously the society whose annual meeting the incident happened at, the employer relationship (via the editor-in-chief appointment) of the journal’s top editor, and the publisher deciding whether the journal can report on its own conduct.
For research-integrity offices, sponsored-programs staff and anyone who advises researchers on where editorial authority actually sits, the ADA episode is a live illustration of a structural risk that’s easy to describe in the abstract and easy to miss in practice: a membership society’s journal is not automatically insulated from the society’s own governance and public-relations interests just because it carries the trappings of a normal peer-reviewed journal — masthead, editorial board, COPE membership. The journal editor’s authority over content is only as strong as the publisher’s willingness to honor it when the content is unflattering to the publisher itself. Whether the ADA’s board ultimately grants the four demands in the members’ open letter, and whether Diabetes Care is allowed to publish its own account of what happened at its own society’s meeting, will be a concrete test of whether that authority holds.
What’s still unresolved
As of this writing, none of the four demands in the July open letter — leadership resignations, an independent investigation, a full apology, and restored editorial independence at Diabetes Care — have been publicly granted. The ADA has said a report is being prepared but has not given a date for its release. CASRAI will follow up as the board’s review concludes and, in particular, whether Diabetes Care is subsequently allowed to publish its editors’ own account of the events without further leadership intervention.
