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(Note, this is purely informational, I completely disagree with what MIT is doing in this case) It is interesting that they have never heard of third party's i

(Note, this is purely informational, I completely disagree with what MIT is doing in this case) It is interesting that they have never heard of third party's intervening in FOIA cases because it actually is a common occurrence in academia. Many times, a professor at another university will file a FOIA request for your grant application. If you feel your research plans are threatened by having the details of your grant passed along to this other professor, your university will intervene on your behalf in the FOIA request. This is especially true if there is patentable material in the grant that they fear will be threatened by wide dissemination of the contents of the grant. Even if they fail in blocking the FOIA request, they usually can at least delay the release long enough to file a preliminary patent on the material described in the grant application. I can understand reporters not having heard of this tactic, but I'm surprised an expert FOIA litigator would be unfamiliar with these cases.

angersock 13y ago
I thought academia couldn't get any more childish, and then here we are. Wow.
- davorak 13y ago
  What gives you the impression that it is childish rather then just working with a system they can not change?
  - angersock 13y ago
    Issuing FOIA requests to screw over a competitor seems a bit much, right? Then again, there may well be some aspect of this I'm missing.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    There is another option, which is to do your own research and live (and die) by a personal code of ethics. I don't believe that people "sell out," though I do believe that people "buy in." Adhering or conforming to a system you do not believe in is "buying in" to it.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      It's a nice way to think about it, but you have to sell out from one system to buy into another, right?
    - davorak 13y ago
      The follow kind situation is what I think motivates fighting FOIAs: Depending on your field a research could take a few years to develop a technique. The technique by itself will not produce a very valuable publication, but the results it can reveal could be ground breaking. In the grant proposal, in order to convince those who are judging of the value of the technique, you detail some of the hard won technique. A competitor issues a FOIA learns the technique and may very well be able to publish the ground breaking results first. This means years of work and funding have had considerably less benefit then anticipate. It is likely it will be a little harder to win additional grant/funding due to several apparently unproductive years on the researches part.
- inopinatus 13y ago
  "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." - Wallace Stanley Sayre. [aka Sayre's Law]
jmharvey 13y ago
That's a reasonable explanation, but "we have scientific knowledge that we'd like to hide, an we're asking the government for more money to further our understanding of the subject" isn't much of an excuse. Isn't the entire rationale for providing government funding for academic research premised on the idea that scientific knowledge is a public good, to be shared freely?
- mjn 13y ago
  The government has purposely set up the process in an adversarial manner (you must prove why you uniquely are positioned to make scientific advances here, better than anyone else), so it's not surprising that the process plays out in an adversarial manner. The government also encourages institutions to be entrepreneurial by doing things like patenting their results, or keeping them as trade secrets to hand to spinoff companies, so academia can prove its worth in the startup economy. Is this the best way to make scientific advances? Probably not. But it's a systemic problem. There is at least one study (I believe Canadian, can't find a link currently) which found that it would be more efficient just to give every researcher in Canada some baseline funding, rather than spending all the money they currently do on the adversarial funding process. That was actually somewhat closer to the traditional CS funding model in the U.S., though largely accidentally, through military funding. Why did someone like Richard Stallman (not an academic) get employed for decades in the MIT AI Lab? Because DARPA gave non-micromanaged block grants to the MIT AI Lab to fund a "center of excellence" for years at a time, which they were free to use to employ staff as they saw fit. Nowadays most grants are 3 years long and very specific, so it's all about positioning yourself for the next 3-year grant, if you want to keep the lights on and your staff paid.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  It has to do with competition for scarce grant resources, and some researchers being cutthroats. Some of them are surprisingly petty, too.
- ISL 13y ago
  Grant applications contain plans and guesses. If you're better positioned to capitalize on someone else's plan, they're screwed. Grant applications are submitted with at least a partial understanding of confidentiality. Because they're confidential, you can't cite them. The first group to publish a new result gets the cookies.
Cyranix 13y ago
Does the researcher whose grant application is being sought need to do anything to discover the FOIA request, or does the filing automatically notify them in some manner?
- ISL 13y ago
  Sometimes people attempt to FOIA lab notebooks. If you're a patent lawyer, you've nothing to lose by tying up a research group in knots. It's bad news when it happens.
gaadd33 13y ago
Would the university really be considered a separate third party given they usually hold and administer the funds for a grant and the researchers tend to be affiliated with them?
tzs 13y ago
> It is interesting that they have never heard of third party's intervening in FOIA cases because it actually is a common occurrence in academia. They didn't say thy never heard of a third party intervening. They were more specific: he says "I have never, in fifteen years of reporting, seen a non-governmental party argue for the right to interfere in a Freedom of Information Act release of government documents." The key here is GOVERNMENT documents. The example you give: > Many times, a professor at another university will file a FOIA request for your grant application. If you feel your research plans are threatened by having the details of your grant passed along to this other professor, your university will intervene on your behalf in the FOIA request is a third party intervening to try to stop a FOIA request involving their own documents. By "their own documents" I mean they wrote the documents. The documents were then submitted to the government, which is why they can be reached by FOIA, but they are not "government documents" in the sense that the writer intends, I believe. The documents MIT is trying to get involved with were written by the government. They are partially about MIT, but they are not MIT's documents in the way a grant application from MIT would be.

angersock 13y ago

I thought academia couldn't get any more childish, and then here we are. Wow.

davorak 13y ago
What gives you the impression that it is childish rather then just working with a system they can not change?
- angersock 13y ago
  Issuing FOIA requests to screw over a competitor seems a bit much, right? Then again, there may well be some aspect of this I'm missing.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  There is another option, which is to do your own research and live (and die) by a personal code of ethics. I don't believe that people "sell out," though I do believe that people "buy in." Adhering or conforming to a system you do not believe in is "buying in" to it.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    It's a nice way to think about it, but you have to sell out from one system to buy into another, right?
  - davorak 13y ago
    The follow kind situation is what I think motivates fighting FOIAs: Depending on your field a research could take a few years to develop a technique. The technique by itself will not produce a very valuable publication, but the results it can reveal could be ground breaking. In the grant proposal, in order to convince those who are judging of the value of the technique, you detail some of the hard won technique. A competitor issues a FOIA learns the technique and may very well be able to publish the ground breaking results first. This means years of work and funding have had considerably less benefit then anticipate. It is likely it will be a little harder to win additional grant/funding due to several apparently unproductive years on the researches part.
inopinatus 13y ago
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." - Wallace Stanley Sayre. [aka Sayre's Law]

jmharvey 13y ago

That's a reasonable explanation, but "we have scientific knowledge that we'd like to hide, an we're asking the government for more money to further our understanding of the subject" isn't much of an excuse. Isn't the entire rationale for providing government funding for academic research premised on the idea that scientific knowledge is a public good, to be shared freely?

mjn 13y ago
The government has purposely set up the process in an adversarial manner (you must prove why you uniquely are positioned to make scientific advances here, better than anyone else), so it's not surprising that the process plays out in an adversarial manner. The government also encourages institutions to be entrepreneurial by doing things like patenting their results, or keeping them as trade secrets to hand to spinoff companies, so academia can prove its worth in the startup economy. Is this the best way to make scientific advances? Probably not. But it's a systemic problem. There is at least one study (I believe Canadian, can't find a link currently) which found that it would be more efficient just to give every researcher in Canada some baseline funding, rather than spending all the money they currently do on the adversarial funding process. That was actually somewhat closer to the traditional CS funding model in the U.S., though largely accidentally, through military funding. Why did someone like Richard Stallman (not an academic) get employed for decades in the MIT AI Lab? Because DARPA gave non-micromanaged block grants to the MIT AI Lab to fund a "center of excellence" for years at a time, which they were free to use to employ staff as they saw fit. Nowadays most grants are 3 years long and very specific, so it's all about positioning yourself for the next 3-year grant, if you want to keep the lights on and your staff paid.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
It has to do with competition for scarce grant resources, and some researchers being cutthroats. Some of them are surprisingly petty, too.
ISL 13y ago
Grant applications contain plans and guesses. If you're better positioned to capitalize on someone else's plan, they're screwed. Grant applications are submitted with at least a partial understanding of confidentiality. Because they're confidential, you can't cite them. The first group to publish a new result gets the cookies.

Cyranix 13y ago

Does the researcher whose grant application is being sought need to do anything to discover the FOIA request, or does the filing automatically notify them in some manner?

ISL 13y ago
Sometimes people attempt to FOIA lab notebooks. If you're a patent lawyer, you've nothing to lose by tying up a research group in knots. It's bad news when it happens.

gaadd33 13y ago

Would the university really be considered a separate third party given they usually hold and administer the funds for a grant and the researchers tend to be affiliated with them?

tzs 13y ago

> It is interesting that they have never heard of third party's intervening in FOIA cases because it actually is a common occurrence in academia. They didn't say thy never heard of a third party intervening. They were more specific: he says "I have never, in fifteen years of reporting, seen a non-governmental party argue for the right to interfere in a Freedom of Information Act release of government documents." The key here is GOVERNMENT documents. The example you give: > Many times, a professor at another university will file a FOIA request for your grant application. If you feel your research plans are threatened by having the details of your grant passed along to this other professor, your university will intervene on your behalf in the FOIA request is a third party intervening to try to stop a FOIA request involving their own documents. By "their own documents" I mean they wrote the documents. The documents were then submitted to the government, which is why they can be reached by FOIA, but they are not "government documents" in the sense that the writer intends, I believe. The documents MIT is trying to get involved with were written by the government. They are partially about MIT, but they are not MIT's documents in the way a grant application from MIT would be.