Short answers, pulled from the story.
PNAS stands for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. It is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal and the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, publishing original research, scientific reviews, commentaries, and letters since 1915.
PNAS accumulated more than 1.9 million cumulative citations from 2008 to 2018, making it the second most cited scientific journal in the world. Its 2024 impact factor, according to Journal Citation Reports, is 8.9.
PNAS was established by the National Academy of Sciences in 1914, with its first issue published in 1915. The first managing editor was mathematician Edwin Bidwell Wilson.
A 2023 review by Holliday et al. found that the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which the authors linked to pseudoscience, entered the literature through a nonstandard PNAS review process involving National Academy members. Critics called these reviews "pal reviews", and they were significantly curtailed in 2010 partly due to that controversy.
In 2005, PNAS published a paper titled "Analyzing a bioterror attack on the food supply: The case of botulinum toxin in milk" despite objections from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Academy president Bruce Alberts published a commentary alongside it titled "Modeling attacks on the food supply".
PNAS is a delayed open-access journal with a six-month embargo period. Authors can pay a fee to make their article immediately open access under a Creative Commons license, a model available since September 2017. Since January 2019, the journal has been online-only, with print issues available on demand.