Research data gathered by state colleges and universities would be exempt from disclosure under the state Freedom of Information Act until the project involved is finished if a new bill becomes law.
Research topics ranging from fluoride use in public drinking water to ongoing studies of water quality in the Illinois and Buffalo rivers attract attention from interested parties, said Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville. He decided to file House Bill 1080 after seeing email and online articles that included partial results of studies in progress, Douglas said.
"Taking a couple of days of data out of a two-year study is like watching two or three frames out of a two-hour movie," he said. "You can't really tell anything from that." Under the bill, any data collected by a study would be available under FOI once the study was complete, he said.
The bill isn't needed because the results of any good scientific study will not be affected by a study being done in the open, Dane Schumacher of Berryville said Monday. Schumacher is chairwoman of the legal committee of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance. The nonprofit alliance opposes approval of a large-scale hog farm in the watershed of the Buffalo National River. She has filed FOI requests for research data in an ongoing study monitoring of that farm.
HB 1080 could affect information both timely and important to the public while it's also subject of an academic study, Schumacher said. For instance, monitoring of C&H Hog Farms near Jasper was turned over to the University of Arkansas in a memorandum of understanding drawn up by the governor's office, she said.
The agreement was reached after the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality approved the farm. The memorandum makes the research data being collected and the monitoring of the farm the same, Schumacher said. If this bill became law, a spill at the farm could be exempt from immediate disclosure.
The Arkansas Freedom of Information Coalition will meet today for the first time since the bill was filed, said Tom Larimer, spokesman. The watchdog group of journalists, legal and government scholars and government officials knows about the bill but hasn't taken a position, Larimer said. Spokesmen for the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which does medical research, had no comment on the bill Monday.
Documents detailing how the research is done and the subjects of the research wouldn't be exempt under the provisions of the bill, Douglas said. The bill is assigned to the House Education Committee.
"Anything regarding a study's scope or methodology would still be subject to the FOI under this bill from the beginning of any study," Douglas said. "I don't want to do anything to reduce the transparency of the method that a study uses. People need to know if the way the study's being conducted is valid.
"Right now, the bill is too broad," Douglas said. "I want to tighten it up and make sure nobody can interpret this as something that restricts access to administrative records or emails or anything like that. The best way to do that is get the bill out there and talk to people who are concerned about that."
The exemption would cover "manuscripts, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific or academic papers, plans, or proposals for future research and pre-publication peer reviews," according to the bill.
Doug Thompson may be reached at [email protected] or @nwadoug.
NW News on 01/20/2015