Boulton on scientific practice and malpractice

Geoffrey Boulton is giving a speech to JISC, the goverment body which "inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK's position as a global leader in education". (Austerity, what austerity?). His comments are being widely tweeted under the hashtag #jiscmrd. Here are a few interesting ones:

Bolton from Royal Society saying that its "malpractice" to not publish underlying data to research at same time as paper published

“@ScienceBL: Boulton says publishing of data should be concurrent with the paper. #jiscmrd #datacite” <- very much agreed.

Boulton: cures for scientific fraud: open data for replication, transparent peer review, personal and system integrity #jiscmrd

#jiscmrd Geoffrey Boulton: open data is our responsibility to citizen science.

It's funny to see Boulton calling for transparent peer review after failing to investigate allegations of journal nobbling - probably the single most important issue to have emerged from Climategate - during the Russell inquiry.

The latest from Pat Swords

Pat Swords writes with the latest news from his legal battle to have Irish energy policy declared illegal under the Aarhus Convention.

On Tuesday the case to be heard the next day (13th) went instead into adjournment until the 11th April. There are complex legal issues involved in the case, which I have not yet had the time to finish writing up, but they go beyond the renewable energy issues to the core principle of access to justice and 'who watches the watch keeper'. The lawyers on both sides have agreed to extra time to prepare additional written affidavits. In summary though, due to Ireland's failure to ratify the Convention, I could not have taken my case in the Court until after Ireland's ratification of the UNECE Convention took effect in September 2012. As it turned out, the ruling had by then come through from the UNECE Compliance Committee and I brought it before the High Court and got leave in early November 2012, within the recognised time frame applying post ratification.

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Start of a long struggle

I really am a glutton for punishment. My latest fray in the world of FOI is a request for correspondence relating to the formulation of the Stern Review. I've asked for related correspondence from Stern himself, Gordon Brown, and Brown's special advisers.

If I recall correctly, the Treasury are pretty notorious for flouting transparency legislation, and this looks as if it is going to be no exception. My request was made under the Environmental Information Regulations but the Treasury are insisting that it should be handled under the FOI Act (which will allow them to reject it on cost grounds). They say that because they are an economics and finance ministry, the correspondence I'm after will not be communicating environmental information. The fact that they have come up with this response without actually referring to the EIR legislation tells you everything you need to know.

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The bureaucrat as green activist. Again.

Chris Horner is pursuing another very interesting line of inquiry into the activities of the US Environmental Protection Agency - one that looks as though it will provide yet more evidence of bureaucrats using their powerful positions to advance the interests of green activists at the expense of taxpayers.

Environmental Protection Agency officials are making an "on-going practice" of "near-immediate turnaround to provide records to environmentalist pressure groups," while imposing "starkly disparate treatment of groups with different perspectives but which are otherwise similarly situated," a conservative think tank charges today in a unusually lengthy Freedom of Information Act request."

Friends of Richard

Anthony Watts reports that private email accounts scandal - the Richard Windsor affair - which is currently engulfing the US Environmental Protection Agency is about to get even wider.

New emails show acting Administrator Perciasepe used non-official email to conduct official business. EPA Region 8 Administrator, who is resigning this week, is being investigated for the same problem.

Read the whole thing.

Brendan Montague

I had an email from Don Keiller the other day. He had been contacted by a “freelance journalist”, Brendan Montague, who wanted to know about his connections with GWPF and what he knew about their funding sources. Don seems to have sent him on his way fairly quickly, advising him that his time would be better spent looking at WWF and Greenpeace.

Strangely, Montague's name has come up in conversation a few times in recent weeks, although in fact I've known of him since 2010. Near the first anniversary of Climategate, I got an email from him, again claiming to be a freelance journalist, and saying he wanted to interview me about a story about the anniversary for the Sunday Times.

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Principle of proportionality

Pat Swords is well known to reader as the man behind the legal challenge to the Irish Government's renewables policy. Here he writes about the current state of play.

Ultimately the wind and climate change scandal at EU, member state and municipality level is nothing more than a reflection of a weak democracy. If people solely express opinions, then the political process and the administration which fawns to it, will just exist to manipulate various opinions to maximise its agenda. If progress is to be made, we have to move away from public opinion to holding the administration to account on the detail, in particular did it follow the procedural requirements to reach the position it is now in. For instance it may not be quite so important that the Climate Research Unit derived a somewhat unique version of climate change records, but it is hugely important that they acted unlawfully in relation to the transparency of how they derived this. Who watches the watchman? Unfortunately it is left to the concerned citizen, mostly being those who do 'detail' to enforce these standards. Not the Lord Oxburghs of the world. Only in such a manner is the dreadful position we are now in going to be reversed, before more collateral damage occurs.

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Officially sanctioned conflict

Some weeks back, I noticed the odd dual role of Bernie Bulkin, chairman of DECC's Office for Renewable Energy Deployment, who doubles as an adviser to VantagePoint Capital Partners, a company that invests in the energy sector. Reader Terry Sanders has been following up on this story and writes to update us on what he has found.

After reading [your post] I looked into Bernie and discovered he was a director of Ludgate Investments which had a significant piece of its funds (7.9%) in a biomass company so I left a comment on his blog asking about it. My comment stayed in the "awaiting moderation" for 10 days which 1 thought was strange. I figured if they haven't let it through or declined it then they must be discussing it so I sent in a FOI request for all communication regarding the comment.

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Curbs on FOI

The government is considering introducing curbs on FOI requests:

Changes to the cost cap on requests could radically cut the proportion of requests under the FOI legislation that are answered.

Other changes would allow officials to add into the cost their “thinking time” when deciding to give answers further limiting the information that would be released.

One proposal would stop reporters from the same media group from making requests that cost more than £450 or £600 in the same three month period.

Previously the cost limit only applied to the actual requests for information, and not to the person asking for the information.

The latter idea in particular is astonishingly daft. The idea that you should effectively incentivise civil servants to think more slowly almost defies belief.

Some of the biggest brains in Whitehall might seize up completely.

The roadmap

This is a guest post by Chris Horner.

Information continues to flow in the struggle to bail out the Hockey Team, piecing together the relevant "context" to ClimateGate. This pursuit is of critical importance to he Team, and "the cause", given the solemn vow that this missing context would explain ClimateGate away as something other than "the worst scientific scandal of our generation". Despite this, and the eagerness of certain among the team to claim "exoneration" where sadly none exists, the Team don't seem to want to be helped.

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Changes to FOI enforcement

The government has published its response to the post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act. A number of the recommendations of the Justice Committee have been accepted, but there is a sense of the bureaucracy trying to move as little as possible. For example on the issue of offences under the FOI Act being all but non-prosecutable because of the time delays involved, the government says this:

The Government accepts the conclusion of the Select Committee that the current provisions under section 77 are insufficient to allow the Information Commissioner’s Office sufficient time to bring a prosecution where appropriate. However, the Government does not consider it necessary that cases under section 77 are heard by the Crown Court, nor that the existing penalties are insufficient in being an effective deterrent to misconduct. To address the problem, the Government is instead minded to extend the time available to the ICO to bring a prosecution to six months from the point at which it becomes aware of the commission of an offence rather than six months from the point at which such an offence occurs. This change will address the core problem of insufficient time available to bring a prosecution without an excessive response of making the offence triable either way [i.e. in the Magistrates' courts or the Crown Court].

The whole document is quite interesting. For example, it looks as if we will have a new exemption for pre-publication research. This is one to watch closely - would repeated claims of "I'm going to use it again" be possible?

Of equal concern is the possible introduction of fees at the Information Tribunal. This last one is interesting, since it was not actually an idea that was considered by the Justice Committee. Apparently the government (or their civil servants) have introduced the idea on their own initiative.

And it is unequivocally a bad idea. It would allow the bureaucracy to use the full resources of the state to crush FOI requesters - they would simply have to appeal their way as far as the Tribunal at which point the financial burden would put most requesters off. More work to do.

More EPA fallout

The story that Lisa Jackson, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, was using an alias to try to avoid Freedom of Information requests is growing legs.

Yesterday came the news that even Jackson's natural supporters on the left had called for an investigation into her conduct. Then it was revealed overnight that the secret email account in question - in the name of Richard Windsor - had been directly linked to PCs used by Jackson.

Popcorn required.

The wily Mr Windsor

Chris Horner has uncovered an extraordinary attempt by the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency to hide her emails from public scrutiny. I mentioned Chris's book The Liberal War on Transparency a week or so ago. However, the story of the manoeuvrings of the EPA has now developed legs:

In response to my book, not one but two former fairly senior EPA officials have contacted me to provide the alias used by Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, to keep her mail secret. I was told it was “one of the alternate email addresses she used.”

Ms. Jacks on is the “eco-warrior”, “most progressive EPA chief in history” — pushing Obama’s backdoor march (other ways “of skinning the cat”) toward cap-and-trade.

Or, as you may come to know her, “Richard Windsor.” This morning, we proceeded with a request under the Freedom of Information Act (in-boxes don’t close on federal holidays) in order to find out what she was saying in private about her radical plan to avoid public scrutiny.

“Richard Windsor.” That is the name — sorry, one of the alias names — used by Obama’s radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it.

In response the House Science Committee has launched an inquiry. Interesting times.

Oh dear

Tony Newbery has lost his FOI claim for the details of the attendees at the BBC's climate change seminar. The decision was issued in an extraordinarily short period of ten days (it normally takes four weeks).

But that's not the reason for the headline. The reason is to be found in Andrew Orlowski's latest post on the hearings:

Tribunal judge David Marks QC supported the broadcaster, cut off several avenues of questioning from Newbery, and agreed with the BBC that it can be considered a "private organisation", despite the fact that it is funded by a compulsory tax.

The hostility of lay judge Alison Lowton, one of the three-strong panel, to Newbery was also noticeable - but perhaps understandable. The former director of legal services [PDF] of Camden Council took a six-figure severance package in 2007 when her post was abolished. Camden fought to keep the details of the settlement away from freedom-of-information requests.

The other lay judge, former Haringey councillor Narendra Makanji, appears to have strong views on climate-change skeptics, as he tweeted here this year:

Michael Hintze who dines at no 10 is backer of Global Warming Policy Foundation, climate change deniers fronted by Nigel Lawson. Pls RT.

We asked the Information Commissioner's Office how a lay judge with such partisan views on climate change came to oversee hearings so closely coupled to the subject of climate. Campaigning lay judges would not normally be appointed to sit on such a case, a spokesman noted, and concerns would be legitimate grounds for appeal.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

More DECC Climategate correspondence

Leo Hickman has had some more of DECC's correspondence relating to Climategate.

The first one that catches my eye is this email to the minister at DECC, informing him that the Russell Report will be published on 7 July. Although the email is dated 2 July, there is a message within the message dated 26 May 2010. This would appear to suggest that ministers were aware of the date of publication six weeks before the general public, which would be odd for an independent inquiry. I would counsel against leaping to conclusions, but it's worth checking out. The redactions in the document appear unjustified to me too.

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