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by dekhn
1209 days ago
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Even if I published my statement (which I believe to be factual, not merely humorous), Nature would not sue me for libel. All that would do is bring more attention to the Nature racket. Anyway I think there is a role for "sexy but wrong" journals- but that role is limited to extremely competent scientists working at the state of the art of their quantitative field. I don't think anybody should take what gets published in Nature and just sort of naively share it on social media with the claim it proves/doesn't prove something. The context required to evaluate a Nature paper on its merits is absolutely enormous. |
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“Factual” and “humorous” aren’t opposites. I think “publishing in Nature is a strong signal that the results are wrong” is likely to be determined to be an opinion, regardless of whether you mean it serious or as a joke.
The basic dividing line the court has drawn between “factual claim” and “protected opinion” is whether the claim is objective and can be proven true or false.
In general it seems (to me, a non lawyer) that your signal claim isn’t an objective one. There’s no hard line about when a journal would be a “strong signal” vs a “weak signal” vs “no signal” about something being wrong. It’s not really a statement that can be proven to be true or proven to be false. Which is why I think it would be considered to be your opinion about Nature (even if a very serious opinion)