I hope you get your report. I’d like to advise you how a similar situation was resolved, and hopefully Chris won’t delete my post. Here’s how other people got their information via FOIA, and maybe it will work for you too.

There were scientists in Britain, in a undisclosed field, who were accused of misconduct. The entity employing the accused scientists, employed an “independent commission” to investigate. That commission is now refusing FOIA requests for its documents, on the grounds that it is “independent” and not subject to FOIA requests.

The scientists seeking the information, were able to prove that because the entity paid the independent commission directly, the FOIA laws carried over to that commissions work, as it was a paid-for-product owned by entity itself.

Good luck with your request. Data should never be hidden.

Thanks Chris. Lets talk about Eugenie’s story. Lets try to do it without any context whatsoever, and without comparing it to other extremely similar allegations of scientific misconduct, that were treated extremely differently by you at this blog.

The Accuser:
Who made the allegations of fraud? That’s noticeably missing from this article. Reading through the links, it says:

“The allegation, made by a reviewer for Nature Physics, was confidential.”

So this is a anonymous allegation. This leaves us no way to evaluate the motives of the accuser. We have no context in which to understand this accusation. Is it from a scientists with a competing theory or technology? Is it from a scientist who lost out on funding?

Funding:
…John Spence, a physics professor at Arizona State University with a joint appointment at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said they (the allegations) are “very troubling. . . . This is a field that involves the use of very expensive, highly centralized facilities, and Pennycook’s group is the best funded.”

Violating Peer Review Procedures:
Word of it circulated unofficially among scientists, however, and several have now raised broader concerns about the reliability of the work…

What happened to the sanctity of the peer-review process? Since when is it ok in the scientific community to group-forward emails with powerpoints attached making back-room accusations? Is this the way science operates?

Why did the peer-review process get thrown out the window?

Officially:
Karl Ziemelis, Nature’s physical sciences editor, said the journal is unable to publicly discuss submitted manuscripts, even ones with serious problems, because they are confidential.

Unofficially:
The comments were provided to the Globe on the condition the reviewer not be identified.

Finally from the Article:
“All the mistakes uncovered in our publications are editorial in nature, regrettable, and without impact on the scientific conclusions,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Where have I heard that one before, Chris?

You said:
“…I think it’s because this petition is for a report on an actual incident of actual academic integrity where state funds were used and the review was done by only intereted parties and not a third party (like the climate-gate thing)…”

You are referring to:
“…In another example, the group had replaced some, but not all, of the electron energy loss spectra taken from a sample with allegedly completely different ones when a reviewer suggested the scientific conclusion that atomic-scale resolution had been achieved were not fully supported by the originals.”

This is exactly what the Climate Scientists did. Climate Scientists replaced some, but not all, of the historic proxy data of temperature records, with modern temperature records. They did this arbitrarily, based on whichever record gave the data they wanted for that point in the graph.

More recently its also been discovered that they deleted not only the modern end of the proxy data, but also the first first 100 years of the same data set, because it also “disagreed” with their intended message.

This is a double standard.

What if its a legitimate scientists who is also a climate denier, then do you support the FOIA requests? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/28/ico_climategate_release_this_rubbish/

A leading Oxford physicist, Professor Jonathan Jones, made the successful request for CRUTEM data, which the ICO has now published. The UEA of Climategate fame lost all of their objections, and were forced to turn over the information.

How can you justify the hypocrisy of having one set of FOIA rules for Climate Deniers, and another FOIA rules for everyone else? The law applies equally to scientist and non-scientists alike.

Your position appears highly biased. You support FOIA when the target is the DOE, but you don’t support FOIA when the target is Climate Scientists.

Please explain your justification for this bias.

I’m just taking a guess here, but I think it’s because this petition is for a report on an actual incident of actual academic integrity where state funds were used and the review was done by only intereted parties and not a third party (like the climate-gate thing), and that this is not just the attempted fulfillment of the wet dreams of a myopic Attorney General.

Thank you for this guest post.

Do you feel that your repeated requests via FOIA are “harassment” to the scientists involved?

The reason I ask is that the scientific community has recently published a series of articles claiming that using FOIA requests against scientists, like in Climate Science, is in fact a burden and even “harassment” of the scientists involved.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/group-condemns-harassment-of-climate-scientists/

Why is it harassment to FOIA a climate scientist, but not harassment when you do it??