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Scientists Want To Keep Their Research Work Out of Court
concealment writes "How much privacy is the scientific process entitled to? During the course of their work, researchers produce e-mails, preliminary results, and peer reviews, all of which might be more confused or critical than the final published works. Recently, both private companies with a vested interest in discounting the results, and private groups with a political axe to grind have attempted to use the courts to get access to that material.Would it be possible or wise to keep these documents private and immune to subpoenas? In the latest issue of Science, a group of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) argue that scientists need more legal rights to retain these documents and protect themselves in court."
Being able to subpoena anything pretty much means having it done by people who have an ax to grind, or to benefit someone with an ax to grind.
It's like asking "should the police be able to arrest suspects?" The answer is that clearly it's not a good idea for the police to arrest anyone they want to, and that we need to make rules about who the police can arrest, but on the other hand, we shouldn't just say "the police should never arrest anyone". Arrests are necessary to catch suspects, and catching suspects is necessary because some of them will turn out to be criminals.
Sometimes people with an ax to grind will need to see scientists' documents, and actually use them to discredit the scientists--but that's not a reason not to do it--that's the whole point of doing it, just like sometimes people will be arrested, tried, and put in jail.
> But the main problem I see with totally public
> access is that the public aren't ready for it.
The public weren't (and aren't) ready for the internet, yet here it is. Previously, the public very manifestly weren't ready for the horseless carriage, but we take cars very much for granted now.
Some things in life you don't get to be ready for.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Actually, many scientists want to keep their data hidden for a time. It is kinda like patents and copyrights, gathering data can be time consuming, expensive, and unrewarding. It is the analysis that gets you credit, so generally scientists want a window where they have exclusive access to their data in order to be first to work with it. There have been some nasty events where some research group got a hold of someone else's data before they were done with it and scooped the glory without having done the unglamorous work.
Research data should be made available to the public for the sake of peer review. Emails and other communication should not be because that would that create a biased opinion for those that read the emails, and emails need freedom to make conjecture without being held to those conjectures for final theories.
Actually, GSK does have to share all their correspondence and preliminary analysis when they get sued. That's where we get a lot of the good stuff. Look up the tobacco industry documents online.
In the US, at least, a judge can order anyone -- even someone who isn't a party to the lawsuit -- to disclose any information that's "in the interests of justice."
I was once sitting through a drug patent lawsuit and they had admitted into evidence a guy's entire 4-drawer file cabinet. They digitized every page, put it in a database, and were projecting it onto a screen in the courtroom.
For one thing, I think scientists are generally more honest than, say, politicians. Full disclosure: I AM a scientist, so I'm biased, but scientists don't go into science for the money. They don't go into it to lie to people. My experience has been that most scientists will admit when they're wrong and will not try to publish fraudulent research, if for no other reason than people are going to likely be repeating their experiments if they're of any importance.
For another, no one makes everything public in any profession. Why should scientists be held to such a high standard compared to law enforcement, lawyers, or politicians? Don't we provide a valuable enough service compared to politicians?
Cost is also a concern in some cases. In terms of time and in terms of storage. In my thesis work, I generated about two terabytes of raw data, most of which was useless even to me. I'm sure the costs to store it wouldn't be monumental, but for how little value anyone would get out of it, it doesn't seem worth it right now. Sorting through e-mails relevant to the work and scrubbing all my personal data out of my lab notebook would also be time that would be wasted.
Lastly, TFS touches on a good enough reason. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The loudest voices crying out for releasing everything are the global warming deniers and creationists, and they clearly want it not to pursue truth but to discredit legitimate science.
Todays culture we have too much information, and most of us are not taught to leave it alone unless it really affects us.
Yes a lot of the information is important, but it really isn't important to use to get all ruffled up about.
We hear all this stuff back and forth digging up dirt on everyone. And what do we learn? Nothing, because this information really isn't important to us. We get emotional about it but we are not enlighten from it.
During the engineering process we come up with small roadblocks. We need a little help an extra eye a new idea. It is one of those setbacks that you have already adjusted in your quote for... If the customer gets that information they will get all emotional about it... however they will not gain any real insight from it. I am going to use a plastic part instead of metal, because it will save the unit cost down, and the metal has a tendency to bend and will need more servicing. The customer will see this as just a cost cutting measure and they will be getting an inferior product, while it is just a case where plastic is a better material than metal for that component.
The customer rarely understands the process and if shown to them will panic because there is a degree of testing and fixing a caos involved, and it isn't just draft, produce, and sell.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Let's have laws linking the right to privacy of the public and scientists, to the rights to privacy of corporate executives, politicians. Let's see if they will relinquish their rights to have private talk corrupt practices. And since they are representatives of public servants of public-supported, publicly owned, legally public entities, they should have very few rights to privacy.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
You didn't read the article. They're not asking to hide the data, they're asking to not reveal the email communication that goes on about the data and the research. Slashdot got the headline completely wrong (shocking, I know).
This is nothing but a fishing expedition on the part of BP to find any juicy nugget they can point at and say "see, even they knew the data was flawed!" I hate to pull out this quote, because it's most likely apocryphal, but it is still true: "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."
If the data is bad, discuss the data. Everything related to the data has been released. There's no need for email communication, which, as someone else already pointed out, is absolutely not for public consumption: people won't understand the purpose of the emails, their context, or even what they mean.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm not sure how "fast" fast enough is. Assuming the Wikipedia article you cite is accurate, Schon received his PhD and was hired by Bell Labs in 1997. He submitted his fraudulent papers over several years, and a committe was set up to investigate discrepancies in 2002, and submitted its report that year showing how Schon had lied. So in roughly five years, the peer-review system did its task to uncover deliberate, premeditated fraud in the field of basic semiconductor research. That seems like a reasonable time to me, given the nature of the research, and the time required to properly document failures to reproduce results and cross-check data. From the sound of things, the fraud may have not been that complicated, basically reusing the same graphs in different papers with different labels, so you would have hoped it would have been caught sooner. I'm not familiar enough with the case to know if Schon was careful to reuse graphs in papers in widely different journals to minimize the possibility of someone seeing the identical graph twice.
Yes, it would have been better if the fraud was caught sooner, but I'm not sure how you would do it, short of something hella expensive like instituing a two-man rule for all research positions everywhere, and demanding independant experiemental validation of all papers before they can be published.
I'm not an accountant, but don't you have to keep correspondence longer than 90 days for Sarbox requirements?
Not if you are not a public company, and not if they don't relate to financial data/statements/controls. There may be other laws that apply though.
SarBox has become a catch-all response whenever a middle manager wants to go on a control-freak/hoarding power-trip. SarBox consultants encourage this because by taking the most expansive possible interpretation of every clause of the law they can generate much more work.