Scientific information pulled from public domain

Federal and state government officials have quietly removed information from the public domain in the months since September 11, and have increasingly asked universities and scientists to submit research for review prior to publication.

In an unusual October letter sent to college and university libraries that serve as federal depositories, U.S. superintendent of documents Francis Buckley asked librarians to destroy copies of a report on large public surface-water supplies in the United States, presumably to prevent such information from being used by terrorists. The American Library Association is not aware of any other government requests that libraries destroy something that had already been made available, according to spokesperson Patrice McDermott.

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Thousands of documents have also been removed from state and federal Web sites since September 11, and many observers are concerned that the document removals are happening without careful vetting and without overarching policy guidance. Many of the documents removed have been freely accessible for years or even decades, and it is unclear how many people have already copied them, or how many of them are available elsewhere.

"We're very concerned that the decisions to withdraw materials have been made precipitately in some cases," says McDermott. "There is no way of knowing the extent of what has been withdrawn, there is no way of knowing how these materials are being preserved for future use, and there has been no public discussion about the criteria for removing things."

Critics say that some of the rescissions jeopardize public health. For example, several environmental groups and governmental watchdog organizations have objected to the removal of information about the ongoing use of hazardous chemicals in the community. "To protect against chemical hazards, the government should be reducing and removing those hazards, rather than hiding them from the public," says Jeremiah Baumann of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

In a related development, some universities say that government research grants are coming with demands for more oversight. Sources at Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that these institutions have been offered federal grants on the condition that the granting agencies would approve the release of any results. Mostly, researchers have been able to persuade the granting agencies to drop the restrictions, but Duke did turn down one grant over the issue. "Allowing an agency to decide after the fact what you can or cannot publish amounts to the potential for censorship of basic research, and that is simply unacceptable for a research institution like Duke," says Jim Siedow, a biology professor and vice provost for research at Duke.