American Tradition Institute sues U of A

The American Tradition Institute (ATI) filed a lawsuit on September 6 to compel the University of Arizona to produce public records regarding the notorious global warming “Hockey Stick.” This is related to the infamous “climategate” scandal which involved the IPCC, the University of East Anglia, and many other universities resulting from “leaked” emails among climate researchers. “Through these leaks, and releases under various freedom of information laws, the public learned of troubling practices by a network of publicly funded academics involving, inter alia, questionable use of statistics, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws in the United States and United Kingdom, campaigns to keep dissenting work from publication, recruiting journalists to target opponents and retaliation against scientists and editors involved in publishing dissenting work.”

ATI says they are seeking records the public has paid for, but are still closely held by certain institutions such as UofA. Two UofA professors resisted an information request originally filed by ATI in December, 2011. ATI alleges that the professors were improperly allowed to decide what emails were responsive to the request, and which ones they would allow the University to produce — UofA ultimately produced several hundred responsive emails.

For more on the story see the ATI press release here.

This incident is part of a larger issue about transparency of and access to publically funded research. It is general practice that results of publicly-funded research is often published in private scientific journals. The public generally cannot read the full papers without a subscription to the journal or paying individually for the paper. Traditional academic publishers are, of course, against open access because it would break their monopoly. The issue of open access is not only about money but also about control of what gets published, and what is denied publication.