This is a seriously sticky situation.
Two days ago, Drug Monkey and Physioprof posted this blog entry which discusses the frightening perspective, from the point of view of a junior scientist, of being legally obliged to give away one’s ideas for a funded grant before completing the research. To an anonymous competitor. Please read it, and the series of comments.
UPDATE: The FOIA request has been rescinded.[…]“the requesting individual has been counseled on the proper use of the FOIA.” Comment on July 27, 2009 5:22PM
It reminds me somewhat of Simon Singh’s situation. One party doing their job in good faith and enabling the proper testing of hypotheses as befits a professional with scientific training, and the other party not, but rather relying on inappropriate legal brawn to obtain satisfaction.
Dr. Isis wonders:
how much of your publicly funded data should be in the public domain? Does the FOIA require disclosure of any tidbit of data generated with public monies? Would people be alright with their data and grants in the public domain if there were an embargo period?
Who should have access to ones ideas? Other scientists? The lay public? As is pointed out, requesting grants, etc. through the FOIA is a strategy used by “animal rights” extremists. How should MRUs protect their scientists from terrorist groups that might use this as a tactic?
What about the media? Should traditional journalists (and, I suppose bloggers) be allowed access to grants and preliminary data to be able to report on the happenings at MRUs?
My response to at least what I put in boldface is, yes. With an embargo. Give it five years, the length of a typical R01. I already add unpublished data – not funded by US money – to GEO and give it a year’s embargo to get my act together to publish, or it goes out there and I hope will be useful to someone. So far, that’s been good personal motivation; we’ll see if it continues as such.
An embargo also gives value for money to the taxpayer, as with some time, certain ideas lose their luster. Should someone else want to pick up the thread and pursue things further, time will have helped sort out some of the wheat from the chaff. But young investigators can still start their laboratories and advance their own ideas without getting stomped on.
Isis and I both are very interested if anyone has a case for full and immediate transparency of untested hypotheses that are approved for testing being made public as soon as the approval has gone through. Personally, I think the procedure of forcing a competitor to reveal their publicly funded ideas, so that you can test them instead, perhaps faster, is a false idea of serving the public interest. The public interest has much more to gain from a trust society that encourages enormous exchanges of information among most scientists, with the addition of any or no embargo that we trust them to administer. These are called collaborations, and conferences.
Heather,
Some of the above, is very much why I was rather attracted into attending this workshop in Glasgow in September.
It should be a rather interesting day, and I’ll blog my thoughts about it shortly after.
Looking forward to reading about your day in Scotland, Graham, and please publicize your post when you make it.
I did tweet this. My heart’s all a-flutter; I can automatically tweet about my posts now. Heh. But Martin is way ahead of me.
Really interesting post and so important.
There’s lots of discussion in the original blog which we probably don’t want to just replicate here but…firstly I’m totally outraged and secondly there is no possible way anyone can imagine that the scientific process can work if people have to disclose all of their ideas before they have had any chance to test them.
The request seems fundamentally unethical and not really in the intended spirit of the FOIA…unless of course we are going to abandon all related things such as patent law and trade secrets. If this approach is legal and is successful then FOIA has to be amended. Confidentially has to be able to exist otherwise academic research will die and companies will just take over everything. This does not serve the public interest at all.
Looking forward to reading about your day in Scotland, Graham J’habite à Glasgow en Ecosse !!
Early last year when I was scouting about for a new job, I did speak with a staff member who works for the Scottish Information Commissioner Whilst they weren’t recruiting at that time, they suggested that I sign up to their e-newsletter to keep my ear to the ground.
On the broad subject of access, FOIA, dedacted etc. I’m hoping that this will be a useful workshop. The only time I’ve been to this venue before was for a this workshop hosted by the Royal Society in 2001.
Hopefully, a few more contacts will be made this time around. I digress.
—
Personally, I think the procedure of forcing a competitor to reveal their publicly funded ideas, so that you can test them instead, perhaps faster, is a false idea of serving the public interest. I could not agree more !
Samantha – I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the request was unethical. The person was attempting to make use of a law that asks for transparency in all matters pertaining to (US, for the time being) government.
This law is, in itself, a pretty good thing. And I think we – you and I, Samantha – have been well inculcated with the current scientific culture of our proprietory right to exploit original ideas with which we come up. But, as employees, or recipients of largesse from patrons, those ideas are in fact not really ours. What is a gray area is when and how much do those ideas belong to others, or to the common good.
And this was a very unpleasant wake-up call.
Ach, Graham, I dinna kin.
Interesting post, Heather. I read this and linked stuff through yesterday – and swung between boiling outrage at the injustice of it, in both directions. I think I’ve settled somewhere in the ‘open-access for publicly funded work’ camp. With allowances for redaction in cases of sensitive information and possibilities for embargoes.
I don’t think there was any real evidence of unethical intentions in this case, just a bit of an impersonal approach to a politically grounded process (the FOIA). Much of the bad feeling could have been avoided by a personal e-mail. We don’t know why that didn’t happen, but probably shouldn’t start with conspiratorial accusations of improper conduct.
The ideas will belong to the person who proposed them first, publicly – as intellectual property. This means that they should be appropriately credited when work based on those ideas is submitted for review/publication, patents, aural scrutiny on the hit-parade…
I think, under ethical practice, this should mean that the originator of an idea should be invited to co-author any novel work based on it, if they haven’t published the idea themselves first. At the very least, the grant proposal should be cited, but this may get a bit messy.
If this doesn’t happen and you read work based explicitly on your ideas published in a grant proposal, but published in the journal literature by someone else, the FOIA will provide a paper trail which can be used to base any appropriate action on.
If inappropriate use behaviour starts to pile up, the public funding agencies will likely have to reconsider how this information is made available – they end up funding research that is being done by the ‘wrong’ people, which is potentially a waste of their money. Results and patents that should remain in the public domain may end up in less public arenas.
P.S. “Know” is more often spelt ken
:-) Mike, we’ll chalk it up to my regional US East Coast accent, then.
The caaaa from afaaaa drove mainly to Qataaaaa?
Bostonian doesn’t seem to come across so easily in print either.
I guess I am making a rather large assumption when I say it’s unethical…however, why make the request anonymously and insist on remaining anonymous if you intend to acknowledge the source of the information or offer them shared authorship.
Threat of repercussions? (I’m just playing devil’s advocate). I mean, let’s say that the FOIA was made under different circumstances. Imagine, it is a junior researcher just starting out with their tenure-track position, trying to learn if the large laboratory they left as a postdoc on poor terms is going to make good on their threat to exploit their results and put three younger postdocs on it. The information in theory should be public, but it would be impossible to request in a collegial manner.
Apparently under the real circumstances described, this was nothing like the situation, and the requester certainly may have had nefarious motives, but the unethical part hadn’t yet happened.
Granted, but if we’re going to have transparency shouldn’t both sides of the transaction have to be transparent?
Further down in the comments on the original thread (down at #62, I occasionally wish I could stimulate conversations that enlisted >62 comments and counting!) Jake suggested that all grants could be published – at least the specific aims “narrative” bit, as I understand it. Further (and previous) comments point out that this version of transparency is utopic unless a lot of other things change as well.
I am not sure that everyone is clear about the problems inherent in making ideas all available, in real time and in uncut versions. Most ideas are wrong, after all. Only those which get proven are worth it – or those which have some evidence to make that line of inquiry worth pursuing, of course. Why should we change an admittedly imperfect system to another where the imperfections (possibility for abuse) are already obvious?
I think worthy of a mention (and it ties in rather well with Heather’s latest comment) is a blog from yesterday What, exactly, is Open Science? from the Open Science Project and the directly related discussion on this thread on FF.
Graham, that is a wonderful entry. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment behind:
“It shouldn’t be enough to publish a paper anymore. If we want open science to flourish, we should raise our expectations to: “Work. Finish. Publish. Release.” That is, your research shouldn’t be considered complete until the data and meta-data is put up on the web for other people to use, until the code is documented and released, and until the comments start coming in to your blog post announcing the paper.”
But as much as I agree with this philosophy (and my most recent paper involving the release of lots of primary data supports this) I can tell you that for most of the community, whether or not a project is complete to this point meets with complete indifference. For most of my co-authors, too. I had to insist to get the data submitted to GEO and the embargoed link provided to the reviewers. None of whom, among the many journals to which we submitted that work, ever bothered to use it. I still have to insist, for two other projects on which I am working now. And given the number of reads that a typical open lab notebook entry gets, that meets with indifference, too.
However, grant applications for funded projects have been given a peer review stamp of approval as to their potential interest and relevance and likelihood to well test the hypotheses expressed therein. Thus, this is much further along in realization than the raw data. So, if Egon’s revised dictum to “‘(work, release)+, finish, publish’” is sometimes, even often, applicable, I don’t think that work, THEN release, finish and publish is. Or worse still under our current system: work, finish, release, publish. Unless it’s already in press.
Samantha, I also read on the other blog that FOIA:ing works both ways – you can relatively painlessly find out who desires your data, through exactly the same system.
So anonymity is temporary, at best. And as Heather Updated in the main post, the original requester has withdrawn the request once alerted to the fact that the supporting Uni wasn’t very happy about the approach.
++UPDATE++ Re. the RIN/FOI workshop in Glasgow on the 14th Sept (as mentioned above), I found out over the weekend that the venue in question was placed into administration.
Oh bugger.
So I contacted the organisers and as I reported here on FF last night, the event is still taking place at the proposed venue.
Game on !!
Thanks for the thorough update, Graham! Looking forward still to the report.
Heather. Report duly written and posted here. I’ve included a link to this post.
The event was more for academic researchers in humanities and social sciences but I’ve done my best to report back in an appropriate fashion.
Thanks a million, Graham! Great illustrations and Web 2.0-style animation – makes for a much more interesting read than my text-only (abbreviations-only?) conference notes taken recently.
Isn’t this subject to abuse in the other direction – that is, no information will be provided at all:
“that researchers can refuse access for information (under an FoI request) …
S.27(2) Where the information is “obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research”.
Seems like one could practically refuse a reprint request like that, not to mention more random, unpublished data.
Thanks, Heather.
Isn’t this subject to abuse in the other direction – that is, no information will be provided at all
I guess you’re probably right. On a more subjective level as pointed out by Harriet Jones in her session, Open Access, empty archives? A word of warning, she gave a number of examples of methods used by people including those within Governments to avoid information being captured, meaning that if a request is made under, FoI, information does not exist !!
Specifically, in terms of life sciences for example, as you allude to, applying S.27(2) could be subject to abuse.
The take home message for those present, I sensed however is that common sense in terms of “to balance individual privacy and public need” should prevail and this is a key concept of FoI.
One should also bear in mind that this was only the second ever such workshop looking iinto these types of issues and pretty much still a learning curve in terms of FoI/scientific research.
The official report of the day written by the RIN should be online early next week, so I’ll place a link to it here in due course.
And here is the official report about the workshop by Sarah Gentleman of the RIN.