I know that at least a couple of you are Legal Beagles. Here's a question:
The "prestige scientific press" (Science, Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, etc) peer-reviewed articles about Climate Change. There are credible questions as to whether the peer review process was intentionally subverted in order to advance a particular political agenda.
Is there a plausible cause of action that could be filed against these publications to force them to divulge the list of the scientists involved in the review of the more interesting articles? Implied warranty of merchantability, etc?
Drop a comment if you have any ideas.
3 comments:
Caveat: I am not a lawyer and I know little about civil law.
If such a cause of action exists, I think it would probably be somewhere in the "contract law" aspect -- that is, either an explicit or an implicit contract with authors that "your paper will be reviewed by X number of objective, knowledgeable scientists in the same field." The key, of course, being "objective."
I can't think of any other way to do it.
In fact, I would doubt it. Peer review is an internal process (internal to the scientific community), and it is a process that is generally understood but not otherwise formalized: every publication, every journal, every institution has different requirements.
Effectively, it's no different that fact checking a magazine article: the letters to the editor pages always show often the fact checkers miss things.
Lots of people are wondering if this is a fraud; yes, but you won't get class action fraud out of this since exact damages to a typical individual would be difficult to assess. You could argue damages to a specific investor or grant underwriter, though.
And I don't know that the prestige press hides that information. Most of them are simply republishing papers. I'd check the editorial masthead to see who's the head of that area.
On the civil side one would generally not sue to disclose the names of the reviewers, but might learn their identities in the course of discovery for an associated suit. For a civil suit one would have to have plaintiffs who have been damaged by the subversion in a fairly direct manner. Perhaps a scientist whose work was not published because of the content of his work?
My preferred course of action in scientific fraud cases of all types would be criminal prosecution under 18 USC 1001, which has very broad language prohibiting a variety of deceptive behavior in an area that is within Federal Jurisdiction. Of course, this would need an administration who were not believers in the cult of global warming
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