Threats must not silence research

The freedom of researchers would be greatly jeopardized if individuals, organizations, companies, or authorities that are not happy with the content of academic articles could have them retracted by issuing threats.  If this were to spread, the citizens´ right of free access to knowledge would be endangered.  

We are formulating our defense in response to a specific circumstance.  
That circumstance is the article that the two researchers Anders Eriksson (professor of phonetics at Gothenburg) and Francisco Lacerda (professor of phonetics at Stockholm) published in December 2007 in the publication International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. The title of the article is “Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously." Here they criticize the systems that have been developed for voice analysis geared to revealing whether a speaker is lying, by identifying emotional stress in the speech signal. They particularly reject the system called Layered Voice Analysis, which was developed by the Nemesysco company.

According to Eriksson and Lacerda, Nemesysco´s system lacks any scientific basis and therefore does not provide any credible information about the speaker´s mental state.  

The researchers carried out their study entirely on their own initiative, and the article underwent customary peer review before publication.  

Through its lawyers, Nemesysco turned to the publisher, Equniox, which owns the journal, and demanded under threat of a lawsuit that the article be retracted and that the editor issue a prominently placed apology in a coming issue of the journal for having published it and for not having given Nemesysco an opportunity to offer its views on the article prior to publication.

Equinox agreed to remove the Internet version of the article and published a notice on its web site where the editor states that the company should have been contacted before the article was published. Moreover, the company informed the authors that Nemesysco intended to sue them for libel if they published the article or anything similar somewhere else.  

We the undersigned have not taken a stand regarding the scientific quality of the article or regarding the question of whether the authors´ manner of arguing is entirely in keeping with good academic practice. This is irrelevant in this context.

What is important to assert is the right of researchers to freely publish academically reviewed findings.

This also includes findings that might be seen as critical of those presented in Eriksson and Lacerda´s article.  

The Swedish Research Council maintains that it is of the utmost importance that the research community, through its organizations, show that it will not tolerate such attempts to curtail or prevent academic discussion and intends to continue to defend the right to freely publish research findings.  

Håkan Billig, Secretary General of the Scientific Council for Medicine, Swedish Research Council
Lars Börjesson, Secretary General to the Committee of Research Infrastructures, Swedish Research Council
Gunnel Gustafsson, Deputy Director General, Swedish Research Council
Arne Jarrick, Secretary General of the Scientific Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, Swedish Research Council
Arne Johansson, Secretary General of the Scientific Council for Natural and Engineering Sciences, Swedish Research Council
Elisabet Nihlfors, Secretary General to the Committee of Educational Science, Swedish Research Council
Pär Omling, Director General, Swedish Research Council  

Upsala Nya Tidning (UNT) 21 February 2009