Nature defends itself in High Court over issue of “freedom of scientific expression”

The trial of a libel action against the publishers of the journal Nature by the former editor of another science journal opened at the High Court in London on 11 November .

Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian mathematician, physicist, and engineer, launched the libel claim over a November 2008 article in Nature reporting his retirement as editor in chief of the Elsevier owned journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. The article, headed “Self-publishing editor set to retire,” noted that he published many of his own papers and questioned whether they had been peer reviewed to the expected standard.

He sued the Nature …