[jacquesm]

This puts Nature's position here as on display in TFA (they don't have to publish everything that is sent in) in a different light. There might be an element of sour grapes here, and if the research is validated then it will have a huge impact on them.

[dekhn]

This isn't "Nature's position". This is a freelance science writer's position, and they paid him for the article. Nature wouldn't even weigh in with a real editorial opinion at this point.

[jacquesm]

It is their name on the masthead. If they don't agree with it they shouldn't publish it. Doing this 'at arms length' allows them to have this under their banner while at the same time being able to say 'that wasn't us'.

[dekhn]

This is standard practice in journalism which is widely used.

If you weren't so involved in the field, would you even care?

[jacquesm]

Yes, I care. I've been a subscriber since the 80's, Nature, SA and the Lancet. I don't think any of them should pull a 'Ted-X'.

[dekhn]

I went through and reread the whole news article.

There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence of anything, and the noise being generated by social amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from the small number of groups competent enough to make useful statements about this "discovery".

[jacquesm]

Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well.

What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.

[bigbillheck]

> I don't think any of them should pull a 'Ted-X'.

That ship's long since sailed, see all those 'Nature Whatver' journals.

[kergonath]

That is completely different. The mini-Natures are still peer reviewed journals with a strict selection process. These journals are usually reasonably high impact, and I don’t think there is evidence pointing towards them having more or less fraud than other journals on that tier. It’s not an amateur slapping a Nature logo on a preprint, which is basically what TEDx is.

[progrus]

Nature certainly would not platform my position on this one. Why would they choose this other person?

Why can I tell you what it says without even reading the headline?

[nonethewiser]

Why did they publish it?