If the public pays your salary, citizens have the right to see what you're doing. That's the principle at the core of the federal Freedom of Information Act and of the many similar state freedom of information laws.
Although politicians like Hillary Clinton get the most attention when congressional inquiries and FOIA requests turn up something unsavory, it's not just civil servants or elected officials who run the risk of embarrassment. A great deal of scientific research is done on the public dime — directly funded through government grants or indirectly via academics working at public institutions — which means some scientists also are subject to transparency laws.
Generally speaking, in the last decade or so, the research community has been moving toward increased transparency, particularly when it comes to any financial entanglements that might cast doubt upon a scientist's objectivity. The backlash, however, has begun, and calls to reverse the trend are coming from some surprising places.
Since the Physician Payments Sunshine Act was signed into law in 2010, a number of medical groups have been trying to water down proposed transparency requirements. Two months ago, the New England Journal of Medicine — a prior leader in the push toward increased transparency — ran a series of articles suggesting that transparency had gone too far.
And the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has often spoken out about the corruption of the scientific process, has begun a campaign against the use of FOIA requests to “bully” scientists or to “disrupt or delay” scientific work. It has also called attention to what it sees as intrusive governmental demands for information.
As it stated in a report this year, “Snooping on researchers' emails has become the 21st century equivalent of tapping their phone lines or bugging a lab's water cooler.”
But such “snooping” on scientists' inboxes by journalists, watchdogs and government officials has revealed significant problems that would never have come to light via other means.
Why should scientists have a privileged position when it comes to freedom of information requests? Taxpayers have the right — the duty — to try to understand what they're doing. Scientists should be subject to the same rules as every other civil servant.
Charles Seife is a journalism professor at New York University. Paul Thacker is a journalist and nonprofit consultant in Washington.
