#Science14, FoIA, and the Line Between Open Processes and Witch Hunts

[Budget Player Cadet_]

So... #Science14.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scientif...rs-rattled-demands-documents-group-opposed-gm

The fierce public relations war over genetically modified (GM) food has a new front. A nonprofit group opposed to GM products filed a flurry of freedom of information requests late last month with at least four U.S. universities, asking administrators to turn over any correspondence between a dozen academic researchers and a handful of agricultural companies, trade groups, and PR firms. The scientists—many of whom have publicly supported agricultural biotechnologies—are debating how best to respond, and at least one university has already rejected the request.

The hashtag, as far as I know, started at Biofortified:

http://www.biofortified.org/2015/03/stand-with-the-science14/

In early February, 14 senior scientists at four U.S. universities received requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) to turn over three years worth of e-mail correspondence with a handful of agricultural companies, trade groups, and PR firms.

All of these scientists have proactively engaged with the public to raise scientific awareness about agricultural innovation and contributed to the scientific consensus about the safety of GMOs.

FoIA requests are a vital tool for a transparent democracy. However, this FoIA is clearly a last ditch witch-hunt by an anti-GMO group to mislead the public and keep scientists from doing their work.

The group US Right To Know is issuing Freedom of Information Act requests to numerous scientists working at US universities, demanding their correspondance with various firms. At first glance, this seems like a pretty straightforward "make sure nothing shady is going down" issue - get the emails of these scientists to various industry figures, and ensure that everything is on the straight and narrow. What's the problem with this? After all, won't actually examining the emails show us what really happened?

Well, three words: "hide the decline".

We’ve seen this anti-science bullying tactic before in Climategate, where academic discussion was taken out of context to mislead the public.

For those not on the up-and-up, a little clarification. Back in '09, the emails of the East Anglia CRU were hacked and released. What happened almost immediately afterwards was that a bunch of biased, partisan hacks sifted through those emails for anything even remotely problematic. When they couldn't find that, they relied on the classic creationist tactic of quote mining - finding something that sounded bad when you took it out of context, removing the context, and pretending that you had a case. In the case of climategate, even after 6 independent investigations all came to the conclusion that there was no skullduggery, we still have numerous people who believe that climate change is a hoax because of biased and inaccurate reporting on the subject.

So now we have this mess. USRTK claims to be unbiased, but anyone can spend five minutes on their website to see that this is not the case. They are intensely anti-GMO, citing entirely one-sided research on the safety and reliability of GMOs. In my opinion, exhibit A can be found on page 36 of this PDF, where they claim:

The agrichemical industry and its PR minions have a history of harsh and career-threatening attacks against their scientific critics, including Tyrone Hayes, Ignacio Chapela, Arpad Pusztai, Gilles-Eric Séralini,
[...]

It's perhaps worth noting that Pusztai straight-up lied about his (poor) research on national television, and Séralini is a notoriously ****ty scientist, essentially the Andrew Wakefield of the anti-GMO movement. Labeling either of them a "scientific critic" stretches the bounds of realism, and both of them have pulled stunts that would end scientific careers for the typical researcher - it wasn't the biotech industry that came down hard on Seralini, it was the skeptical community and the scientists.

So what we have here is an organization which is clearly anti-GMO demanding all of these emails. Is it any wonder that people are worried that we're going to have another climategate event?

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So the problem is this.

On one hand, it should be pretty clear how easy it is to use FoIA requests to bully scientists and find material which is trivial to quote-mine. Climategate showed beyond any reasonable doubt how that was possible.

But at the same time, it is relevant to point out that FoIA requests are a vital tool in ensuring that scientific research remains untainted. If the FoIA requests from USRTK turn up real dirt (something I personally find unlikely)... Well, there you go! Purpose vindicated!

The question is, where do we draw the line? How can we allow for transparency while simultaneously preventing the stifling of opposing viewpoints?