FOI requests for unpublished data

Steve McIntyre made a FOI request to CRU for details of an analysis that was mentioned in one of the UEA emails, but not subsequently published (at least not yet).

Furthermore, the raw data for the analysis is already available online.

This is curious for a number of reasons. First, UK FOI explicitly exempts work-in-progress or draft analyses that are being readied for publication for being release (section 22):

Information is exempt information if—

(a) the information is held by the public authority with a view to its publication, by the authority or any other person, at some future date (whether determined or not),
(b) the information was already held with a view to such publication at the time when the request for information was made, and
(c) it is reasonable in all the circumstances that the information should be withheld from disclosure until the date referred to in paragraph (a).

Similarly, it would seem that the "unfinished product", or "intellectual property rights" exemptions would immediately kick in. Third, the raw data is already available, and so the information required is the description of the intellectual work of analysing the data, not the data itself, before that has been described in the scientific literature.

Should this request be upheld, it would seem to spell the end of privacy for any publicly funded research in the UK. Any rival researcher could simply ask for all work in progress whenever they liked.



Issues: Unpublished data, work-in-progress

CEI and NASA: Lawsuit (ongoing)

After an appeal is denied, or a requester is still not satisfied with the response, a lawsuit for judicial review can be filed.


NASA Complaint

This is ongoing litigation in DC District Court.

The DoJ (acting for NASA) submitted a motion for summary judgement:

Motion for Summary Judgment by DoJ in CEI vs NASA (2010)

which CEI responded to:

CEI response to DoJ motion for summary judgment in CEI vs NASA (2010)

and DOJ replied to:

DoJ reply to CEI in support of motion for summary judgement in CEI vs NASA (2010)

Motions are currently under consideration.

CEI and NASA: Appeal

All US agencies have an internal appeals procedure if requesters are unsatisfied with the initial response. CEI was unsatisified with responses to their first three FOIA requests.


Horner Appeal


The appeal was rejected for two of the three requests, and for the third, it was remanded to GSFC for a 'do-over'.

GISS FOI Response to Appeal

Follow-on: Lawsuit (ongoing)

Issues: FOIA Appeals, definition of agency records

Judicial Watch and NASA: Part I

Judicial Watch (Sourcewatch) submitted the following Dec 4 2009 request to NASA:


Judicial Watch FOIA Request #1

Note the similarity to this earlier CEI request. The response to both was posted in the GSFC Electronic Reading Room in Dec 2009 and with a further update in April 2010.


Use of information: JW blog posts: Jan 2010, Apr 2010; NASAWatch; Rabett Run

CEI and NASA: Part I

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (Sourcewatch) is in the vanguard of submitting FOI requests for climate scientist communications. Their principle targets have been the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, NCAR in Colorado, the U. of Virginia, and the EPA among others. Their requests to NASA started in August 2007 and first concerned the minor correction of the GISTEMP dataset:


FOIA 07-175


FOIA 07-172


The responses were the posted online in the GSFC Electronic Reading Room.

Follow-up: Appeal (denied), Lawsuit (ongoing).