I can give the Committee many examples. One that does not reflect directly on me was during the GM controversy, when there was an experiment by Pusztai that claimed to show that GM foods killed rats. The Royal Society did a review of it that said that these experiments were so flawed,
“in many aspects of design, execution and analysis”,
that no conclusion could possibly be drawn. I have a sneaking sympathy for poor Mr Pusztai. He was a sad but well intentioned little man who did silly things. I am sure that he felt that that quote was malicious. I would like to be reassured that there is a legal sense to “malice” that means “consciously unkind”, as it were. If these amendments had been in place, Nature would have saved £1.5 million fighting a simple case.
When Clause 6 says,
“relates to a scientific or academic matter”,
I take it that that means that, by definition, everything in the journals is of a scientific or academic matter. Often they will be opinionated editorials about issues of interest to the academic community. I thought that I would raise those issues rather than trying to grab someone afterwards.