When Brandon Shollenberger announced that the University of Queensland was threatening him with a libel suit, Anthony Watts noted that the university administrators were almost certainly releasing the unpredictable forces of the Streisand effect.
I guess they don't read Watts up With That in the admin block at the University of Queensland. Today, in their wisdom, they have decided to issue a press release in response:
Recent media coverage (The Australian, 17 March 2013) has stated that The University of Queensland is trying to block climate research by stopping the release of data used in a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
This is not the case. All data relating to the “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature” paper that are of any scientific value were published on the website Skepticalscience.com in 2013.
Only information that might be used to identify the individual research participants was withheld.
This was in accordance with University ethical approval specifying that the identity of participants should remain confidential.
Brandon has written a response here, which makes the statement, which appears under the name of Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan, look monumentally retwardian. It might be interesting to see if it really was McEwan's idea or whether he has just been misled by John Cook (or perhaps a joint effort), but I don't suppose we will ever find out. Bitter experience suggests that there is no crime so heinous that a university administrator is not capable of covering it up.