What happens when a leading world government on the forefront of scientific discovery holds an election, and the newly elected officials and their retinue revoke access to scientific information and important data paid for and used by taxpayers, citizens, and the general public? And what happens when these new leaders then undercut funding that could be used to close gaps in scientific and public health data that clearly led to deaths and disease?

We’re finding out.

black hole

Lack of access to raw data from governmental sources curtails the independence of scientists to conduct research, formulate new hypotheses, and validate results, while preventing citizens from monitoring issues of civic and scientific interest and importance. Information is power, and those newly in power seem reluctant to share either.

These new and apparently accelerating information limitations aren’t strictly aimed at scientists. Secrecy is the new normal. For example, the White House has been barring cameras and other recording devices from press briefings.

White House press briefings are taxpayer-funded events in a taxpayer-funded building hosted by taxpayer-funded employees of the state. There is no privacy provision or allowance. But political expediency now clearly trumps decades of norms and the logic of who is paying for what.

For scientists, policymakers seeking evidence for regulations or laws, or citizens simply wanting to know what is going on, this is only the tip of the iceberg. In April, one of the most valuable global resources for climate change science was removed from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, with one expert who ran it for more than five years writing:

. . . it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity. Some 20 years in the making, the breadth and quality of the website’s content was remarkable. It lasted through Democratic and Republican administrations, partly because its information mirrored the findings of the mainstream scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences, other federal agencies and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This is not the only abrogation of the deal with taxpayers and citizens (as rights are not purely transactional in nature, but broader than that). In February, information about animal welfare was removed from the US Department of Agriculture site, requiring taxpayers to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to learn what is going on in more than 1,200 labs and more than 6,000 other animal facilities, including puppy mills and other such places. Under the ruse of protecting privacy, attempts to change this decision have not fared well in the courts so far, despite the ways such information has been used to curb abuses in the past. The city of Chicago has gone so far as to put a climate page from the prior administration up as it was, to preserve the information. The city of Boston also followed suit for the EPA data.

Lest we forget, Brewster Kahle saw this coming, and mirrored his Internet Archive to Canada once President Trump was elected.

Missing data is also a problem with life-threatening implications. Five local and state officials in Michigan face involuntary manslaughter charges for failing to divulge public health threats related to impure drinking water, which led to a number of deaths and the impairment of an unknown number of children. Recent budget cuts proposed for the EPA would only leave more cities and municipalities in the dark, without the funding to gather and analyze water purity data. As Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public health, is quoted:

The data gaps are so huge. It is abominable. We have a huge number of people in this country living completely in the dark.

Our industry’s economic and financial discussions about open access (OA) business models have focused on what expenses and value publishers contribute, with the Gold OA model emerging as a viable path forward. The suppression of scientific and cultural data now facing us has only slight parallels with OA publishing, as papers are not results or data, merely interpretations of reports and summaries of results. Research reports are not raw data, but are based on raw data. The fate of raw data in many fields is unsettled. However, the fate of raw data generated by governments is clearer, with traditions supporting data availability. Currently, the OPEN Government Data Act is sitting idle in Congress, however. Traditions only go so far.

There are no non-taxpayer-funded value additions to these data sets by separate for-profit or non-profit entities. These data are collected and managed using taxpayer funding, as are the sites that once hosted them (or those that have taken over, in the case of the cities preserving data). There is an uninterrupted line from data acquisition to presentation.

Worse, the bureaucrats making these decisions are themselves taxpayer-funded. Public health crises like Flint surely require public officials, paid by taxpayers, to make the government function for the citizens’ benefit. And removal of public information in its entirety is categorically different from a disagreement about business models. The imperatives here are much more direct and immediate, the affront to society more direct.

US citizens and scientists can no longer understand what is happening in the world around them despite the taxes they’ve paid to support work they wanted done

Ultimately, these impingements on rights and information represent a loss of independence for US citizens and scientists, who now can no longer understand what is happening in the world around them despite the taxes they’ve paid to support work they wanted done, despite their rights as citizens to information generated by their own government on their behalf. Instead, a small cabal of extremists have gained control of the levers of power, and are effectively erasing scientific and cultural information they find threatening or inconvenient, while proposing radical defunding of the agencies that created these awkward facts in the first place.

This is not freedom, scientific progress, or proper governmental functioning.

The level of fervor that once informed the OA debates needs to be turned to these new, deeper, and darker threats to scientific discourse, academic freedom, and citizenship. At least one OA advocate has pitched a long-shot bid for the US Senate, yet governmental suppression of scientific information barely gets a mention in his platform. The game has changed, and suddenly. We are now seeing historical data actually being erased, with state governments, groups like the Sunlight Foundation and the Internet Archive, and individual scientists scrambling to maintain the we’d compiled collectively.

What was once “taxation without representation” is becoming “taxation without information,” which constitutes a particularly galling turn of events in the Information Age. With all of the above in mind, this post ends with a quote from George Orwell:

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Have a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July holiday.

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

Discussion

8 Thoughts on "Independence Lost — Taxpayer Funding and Information Access Take a Dark Turn"

It is shocking that we are in an age when in democracies inconvenient truths are subject to the same brutal treatment that they receive in dictatorships. I read somewhere that PubMed Central is potentially at risk as well.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley

Kent a great essay. As I read it all I could think of was Lyseko and Stalin!

An excellent piece! Among other things, SSP is part of the international scientific ecosystem, and we need to raise our voices when an important component of our ecosystem is under threat. We need to advocate not just for the publishing industry (whatever the business model), but also for the ecosystem on which our existence depends.

Good points. However, with hosting costs so low and internet providing universal access, would not a simple solution be for scientists themselves to provide at least the gist of their results, or may be more, using online repos/knowledge bases, something along the lines of Wikipedia/Wikidata? Well, Wikipedia in its present form is a bit restrictive, but there are alternatives emerging.

If the government were asserting expense as a barrier, we could talk about that. However, the practice seems to revolve around burying data that the current US administration finds inconvenient to their petro-centric and reactionary policy preferences. Providing a focal point for federal research data is very helpful for discovery and longitudinal analysis. Plus, US citizens collectively paid for it, and we pay them, so it’s wrong all around. The fact that there is no meaningful financial burden only underscores that their practices are purely political in nature.

The present situation highlights the vulnerability that has existed for a long while. Having a centralized focal point is indeed highly valuable, given the abundance of published and unpublished material/data. Current unfortunate circumstances perhaps can prompt the research community to reassess the ways that they (we 🙂 deliver content and collaborate. Separating these tools from government seems like a good idea, prominent example being Wikipedia and arxiv.org.

Kent – Thanks for highlighting this issue. I assume folks are aware of efforts like Data Refuge and the Libraries + Network that are working to both archive at risk data and develop durable structures for managing and maintaining it. Some efforts along this line have been ongoing for longer than that, for example in the form of the End of Term Archive begun in 2008.

http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/ (this site is in need of updating – most current EOT data at https://archive.org/details/EndOfTerm2016WebCrawls)
https://libraries.network/
http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefuge
https://www.datarefuge.org/

A useful descriptive post is here: https://libraries.network/blog/2017/3/7/a-long-term-goal-for-creating-a-digital-government-information-library-infrastructure

Although only a part of the puzzle, these efforts are an important exercise in collaborative stewardship by the research community.

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