Open science good, FOIA snooping bad. It’s not complicated. But it’s not easy.
By me, on Medium:
Keep Your Damn Lawyers Out of My Notebooks
"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."
-Jonas Salk
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
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5 comments:
Revised to read: Open science best, FOIA for data sadly needed at times, political requests for personal emails abhorrent and not to be tolerated.
FOIA is grossly inappropriate. Scientists are not government functionaries and have no power except over their students and staff.
FOIA serves a variety of purposes and of course can be abused. However, large institutions may serve as an impediment to the sharing of resources that should be accessible to outsiders. The legitimate use of FOIA has uncovered real problems with research that would otherwise have gone, well, not unremarked as someone had to have suspected a problem or they wouldn't have filed a FOIA request, but unresolved.
I don't know of any unambiguous examples of that, and even if I did, I insist that it's the wrong tool for the job.
What's a better one?
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