"The ESF ... considers that the statement cited above is slanderous"

October 13, 2014 3:30 AM

Last year, Dr. Amaya Moro-Martin, an astrophysicist specializing in circumstellar disks and planetary systems, started a great deal of discussion in the astronomy community when she wrote an open letter to the Spanish Prime Minister explaining that she was leaving Spain because of the bizarrely oppressive bureaucratic policies of the Spanish government and their broken promises to scientific researchers. This year, she has written an opinion piece in Nature arguing that Europe's drastic research budget cuts are short-sighted. In response, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has threatened to sue her unless she retracts the statement that called an evaluation process supported by ESF "flawed".
posted by kyrademon (17 comments total)

Apparently they are claiming that their process is flawless? Good luck with that.
posted by demiurge at 4:23 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Threatening litigation seems like a predictable response from an organization like the EU bureaucracy, which seems to prefer the least effective policies possible.
posted by nerdler at 4:31 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Actually, threatening litigation is so un-European I was wondering if an American were somehow involved. Anyway, they are claiming the process could not be flawed because they followed best practice, which is almost beyond parody in its feebleness.
posted by epo at 5:01 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well that will certainly take care of that. Next on the agenda the Big Endians.
posted by localroger at 5:22 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Whoa, guy at the last link on the Retraction Watch article Godwinned right out of the gate. That's not slander, this is slander! </crocodiledundee>
posted by XMLicious at 5:33 AM on October 13, 2014

But saying "it's flawed because nothing is perfect" is kind of equivocating: we expect "flawed" to indicate the existence of specific, known, and fixable flaws.

No we don't. We certainly don't expect it to imply that the flaws are fixable.

The letter they sent is very weird, since it really does specifically refute the claim that their process is flawed, which can only mean that they are, for realsies, asserting that their decision-making method is flawless. I guess this means Ken Arrow will have to give back his ~Nobel.

A less stupid letter might have attacked the causal connection between their decision-making process and closing half the research units in Portugal.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:47 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Was that letter actually written by anyone with legal expertise? I'd always thought printed statements were libellous, not slanderous. Portugal seems only to have a general defamation statute (with some crazy sounding jail time for defaming "an authority") so it may be a translation error, I guess. But given that Nature is a UK publication, I don't know if Portugese law has primacy. Either way, a nasty case of bullying and perhaps inept into the bargain.
posted by cromagnon at 5:51 AM on October 13, 2014

The flaw is that the funding was restricted at all, not in the way that restricted funding was distributed. As Europe attaches more funding to non-transparent administrative decisions, we shouldn't be surprised that it becomes more litigious.

Yes. As one of the commenters over at Nature observes, as the individual slices of the research-funding cake get smaller, the more resources will go into determining who gets them. More and more funding, then, will go into administration and bureaucratic oversight, rather than research. The perverse incentive to focus on paperwork and surveillance rather than, well, work will only ramify as the resource pool gets smaller. Each university and research centre will have to employ its own administrators to increase the chances of a successful bid. There will be bid writers and editors; project managers; "research support teams." The individual scientists lucky enough to have attached positions will have to spend more and more time attending to paperwork—and the endless queries they'll get from the research bureaucracy employed ostensibly to increase their chances of success—than science. This process is, of course, well underway. Eventually, following this form of "best practice," we'll have an all-administration R & D sector and that'll be just great.

It'll be like the Shoe Event Horizon, except with academic administrators.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:02 AM on October 13, 2014 [7 favorites]

Otherwise it's like pointing to a book and saying: "there's a typo on there." Sure, but where?

Obviously there might be unjust legal regimes where this isn't true, but surely it's the plaintiff's job to show that the claim they assert to be defamatory is (at least probably) false. So if you're suing someone because of their claim that there's a typo in your book, your first job is to show that the book is (at least probably) free of typographical errors. If it were in the US, which it isn't, it's hard to imagine the organization not being classed as a public figure and so requiring them to demonstrate actual malice instead of mere falsehood.

And why single out that book?

How is that relevant to anything? Under any sane legal regime, I can make true statements (meow meow false light meow) about anyone I want to for any reason I want to. Including personal spite, created by anything under the sun. Maybe I hate you because you kicked my dog, or because you jilted me at the altar, or because you have a moustache. Doesn't matter if my statements about you are truthful.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:03 AM on October 13, 2014

Nature is based in England and England has some particularly weird libel laws, so I would be wary of extrapolating how libel "should" work.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:16 AM on October 13, 2014

'Not flawed' ≠ 'Flawless'. English is not propositional calculus (to put it mildly).
posted by Segundus at 6:22 AM on October 13, 2014

London is the libel capital of the world, so good luck to her if she is being sued there, as the rules changed recently, and it made it easier for the suing party to win.
posted by marienbad at 6:56 AM on October 13, 2014

I read her letter and given the present climate in Spain, I am not at all surprised at her leaving. Having lived there for about 18 years, there are lots of wonderful things about Spain. Their Byzantine-style bureaucracy is not one of those wonderful things. I, too, went through their degree convalidation process (without success). She will be one of several Spanish scientists that have come to the USA to do their work (Ochoa, being the most famous) and I hope she will have great success because, for the time being at least, we seem to support our scientists and their endeavors.
posted by McMillan's Other Wife at 7:00 AM on October 13, 2014

So, she can just find-and-replace the word "flawed" with "inadequate" and we're all square, then? This seems like an incredibly wasteful argument about syntax, although that's never stopped a legal battle before. But I am curious about the Portuguese/ESF lawsuit anotherpanacea mentions, and can't find much else about it at the moment.

It seems kind of strange to read all of Moro-Martin's admonishment of the privatization and bureaucratization of scientific research and pick this clause to say "Hey! Our evaluation processes aren't flawed, they're poorly-designed. Get it right."

> She will be one of several Spanish scientists that have come to the USA to do their work [...] and I hope she will have great success because, for the time being at least, we seem to support our scientists and their endeavors.

Thanks for the laugh. Albeit unintentionally, you've brightened my otherwise sickened mood.

A less bitter, more jovial response might have been "#NotAllScientists," but I wasn't feeling it right then.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 7:44 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

That they are suing in the first place, regardless of the bureaucratic justification, wrecks their scientific credibility more than anything. Attacking one of the most prominent research publication's freedom to express opinion is basically an own goal if you're trying to demonstrate scientific integrity.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:15 AM on October 13, 2014

The ESF is currently defending itself against legal efforts to undermine its legitimacy and the legitimacy of its review process.

That's ESF's problem. Nothing in Moro-Martin's editorial mentions any such lawsuit.

Allowing Nature to print that its process is "flawed" in respect to that lawsuit and that process is like allowing the New York Times to print that Trayvon Martin was the aggressor against Zimmerman during Zimmerman's trial. It's unjustified by facts in evidence and pretty obviously prejudicial to an ongoing legal proceeding.

That's just... wow.

First, legal integrity doesn't require everyone everywhere to never publish anything that might influence someone involved in the trial. It requires the people involved in the trial not to read things that might prejudice them... except when it doesn't, as in legal systems where ~anyone is free to submit an amicus brief.

Second, the example you offered is just silly; saying truthfully that a process is flawed is not at all like saying falsely that Martin was the aggressor.

Even in the US, you'd have a good case for libel in such an instance

In the US, the ESF would with virtual certainty be treated as a public figure rather than a private person and would have to show actual malice. This means that the only realistic way they could secure a decision in their favor would be if they could uncover a document trail that said "You know what, guys? It turns out that the ESF's mechanism to award grants isn't flawed after all. But fuck it, let's publish that it is anyway."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:36 AM on October 13, 2014

A piece in one of the pre-eminent scientific journals isn't just a blog post or a Youtube comment. This is a supposedly peer-reviewed piece of evidence, despite the absence of proof.

It's an editorial letter, for God's sake. It is explicitly labeled as opinion. To assert that it purports in any way to be peer-reviewed science is as silly as asserting that a book review appearing in Nature purports to be peer-reviewed science.

Read it like you're not a lawyer for a second. That sentence claims that the cuts are due to the flaw:

Which would be the good argument to make in a demand letter, as I noted earlier in this very thread!

But the ESF didn't attack the probably-false causal claim. Instead, they really did say that their decision process does not have any flaws...

Which is why they, or at least their advocates, look like a bunch of mindless idiots to me, in addition to looking like abusive goons.

There's a context here that you're ignoring.

None of which is present in the offending piece. Are you seriously suggesting that I should be able to collect damages from you for defamation because of what some other people said about me?

Libel in the US is a tort, not a crime, which means the jury would be asked to apply a preponderance standard.

If it got to a jury, and the jury were asked to determine whether or not actual malice existed. I'd expect it to be dismissed by a judge long before that. In any case, I think you simply don't understand how extraordinarily difficult the US actual-malice test for public figures is.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:38 AM on October 13, 2014