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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, 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.
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.