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Published online 16 February 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.99
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Swedish authorities embroiled in furore over academic freedom
Journal removes paper from website after company threatens legal action.
The Swedish Research Council is wading into an escalating row over academic freedom after a peer-reviewed journal removed a published paper — penned by two Swedish academics — from its website following a threat of legal action from the company whose technology the research criticized.
The controversial paper1, entitled 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously', was first published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in December 2007.
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Nowhere in Eriksson and Lacerda?s article is claimed that Mr. Liberman is a liar. The conclusion is simply that the technology cannot work for the claimed purposes and that its poor and irrelevant acoustic analysis is understandable considering that the inventor did not know better. This notion is further reinforced by the statement (above) that "Nemesysco's voice analysis technology has nothing to do with the science of phonetics (?)". Indeed lack of scientific formation offers an explanation for why Acoustic and Articulatory Phonetic issues, that obviously should have been at the very core of the LVA-technology, were not even raised. Clearly, some insight in Acoustic Phonetics might have avoided the incorrect notions and the ungrounded claims made by Nemesysco. Also adequate scientific background could perhaps have guided Nemesysco towards harmless and uncontroversial entertainment applications of its ad hoc technology, rather than towards naive claims that its LVA-technology is relevant for ?(...) psychology and criminology, as well as neurology and other brain science?. Further discussion of the LVA-technology and of the social implications of its use availabe in http://blogs.su.se/frasse/frasse-XpZRX7kQ
NOTE: For some reason the system substituted some of the characters in the original text with question marks. These question marks above should be replaced, in order of appearance, by an apostrophe, an ellipsis and two quotation signs.
I have not read Eriksson and Lacerda's paper, but even if nowhere in the paper is it claimed that Mr. Liberman is a liar, as Francisco Larcerda states, the title of the paper is 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously'. I am not sure if 'Charlatanry' is an English word but a charlatan is a swindler and a con - a person who deliberately lies and decieves, lending credence to the claim of Mr Liberman that he has been called one. Maybe Eriksson and Lacerda should rewrite their paper writing about the science and the facts and leave the readers to make their own judgements, if any are necessary about Mr Liberman's credibility.
Having read the abstract of the paper, Eriksson and Lacerda merely say that "...the absence of scientific support for the underlying principles it is justified to view the use of these machines as charlatanry and we argue that there are serious ethical and security reasons to demand that responsible authorities and institutions should not get involved in such practices." Now that sounds reasonable and does not amount to calling Mr Liberman a liar. Under the circumstances and assuming that they have made no such allegation in their main paper, this does seem like an unwarranted attack on academic freedom.
As a scientist who actively tries to fight against pseudosciences I applaud the auhtors for their courage. Despite a note to the contrary the full-text of the article can still be read and printed here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9673590/Eriksson-Lacerda-2007. A scan can be downloaded from Wikileaks: http://wikileaks.org/leak/lacerda-lie-detectors-2007.pdf