White House policy angers scientists

Friday, December 15, 2006
By Juliet Eilperin The Washington Post

WASHINGTON A new Bush administration policy for reviewing scientific documents before publication has angered some U.S. Geological Survey scientists, who say the elaborate internal review of their work may impede them from conveying information to the public.

The new requirements, unveiled in July but still being put into practice, call for staff scientists to submit all reports and prepared talks to managers to determine if they meet the agency’s scientific standards. They also require researchers to alert the agency press office of any work involving “potential high visibility products or policy-sensitive issues.”

P. Patrick Leahy, USGS associate director for geology, said the agency spent more than two years drafting the new rules in order to ensure all of its scientists are subject to the same sort of rigorous scientific review before they send their work to be published.

STOCK AND TRADE

“What we’re doing is ensuring the scientific excellence of USGS products,” Leahy said in an interview. “Peer review has been the stock and trade of this organization for years and years. How we do that has been different depending on what part of the organization you were in ... What we want to do is (have) our scientists working together in concert with one another.”

But James Estes, a marine biologist who has worked for more than 30 years at the USGS’s Western Ecological Research Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., said that while he has not encountered problems in the past, he and his colleagues now fear their work might be stifled.

LOOKING OVER SHOULDER

“I feel as though we’ve got someone looking over our shoulder at every damn thing we do. And to me that’s a very scary thing,” Estes said, adding that it will be a cumbersome procedure. “There’s been no effort yet other than to intimidate everybody, but to me it’s censorship. ... I think they’re afraid of science. Our findings on ecology could be embarrassing to the administration.”

Leahy acknowledged that some agency scientists were resistant to the idea, even though USGS officials see it as a helpful reform.

“It’s the old thing, in concept it makes a great deal of sense,” he said. “In practice, if you have a change to what you’ve been doing for a long time, you’re not happy with it.”

ALL DOCUMENTS

Under the policy, a USGS employee must submit any scientific document for a peer review that may involve scientists either inside or outside the agency. A supervisor oversees the process, making sure the reviewers are qualified and looking at how the scientist in question responded to any criticism raised by the reviewers.

Rama Kotra, a senior scientist in Leahy’s office, said the review might take just one week for a simple document, but in the case of a complex scientific study “it would take much longer than that,” possibly six months.