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Groups Say Data Withheld for Ideological Reasons
A group of educational and scholarly organizations says that the government is increasingly withholding information and research results that do not accord with the administration's political positions.
In October the American Educational Research Association, the American Library Association, and a dozen other organizations wrote a letter to U.S. secretary of education Rod Paige asking him not to remove materials from the Web site of the U.S. Department of Education. Their concerns were triggered, the groups say, by a memo the education department issued to staff members in May 2002, which recommends the removal from public access of information that either is outdated or "does not reflect the priorities, philosophies, or goals of the present administration." The groups wrote that research and data that have been publicly available in the past "are essential to advancing scientifically based research and need to remain accessible to the library, educational research, and related scholarly communities."
Librarians and researchers also expressed public disappointment when the U.S. Department of Energy in November discontinued Pubscience, a free Web-based research tool that allowed users to access articles published in peer-reviewed journals in one central place. The service was discontinued in response to lobbying by commercial publishers that offer similar services for a fee. Observers fear that such publishers may next target other government resources, such as those offering free agricultural and legal data.
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