Obfuscating with transparency

Jeremy Berg at Science: “Transparency is critical when it comes to decision-making that broadly affects the public, particularly when it comes to policies purported to be grounded in scientific evidence. The scientific community has been increasingly focused on improving the transparency of research through initiatives that represent good-faith efforts to enhance the robustness of scientific findings and to increase access to and utility of data that underlie research. Yet, concerns about transparency associated with scientific results continue to emerge in political discussions. Most recently in the United States, a new proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would eliminate the use of publications in its policy discussions for which all underlying data are not publicly available. Here, a push for transparency appears actually to be a mechanism for suppressing important scientific evidence in policy-making, thereby threatening the public’s well-being.

“These approaches…limit the impact of valuable information in developing policies…”

Under the new policy, studies that do not fully meet transparency criteria would be excluded from use in EPA policy development. This proposal follows unsuccessful attempts to enact the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment (HONEST) Act and its predecessor, the Secret Science Reform Act. These approaches undervalue many scientific publications and limit the impact of valuable information in developing policies in the areas that the EPA regulates….In developing effective policies, earnest evaluations of facts and fair-minded assessments of the associated uncertainties are foundational. Policy discussions require an assessment of the likelihood that a particular observation is true and examinations of the short- and long-term consequences of potential actions or inactions, including a wide range of different sorts of costs. Those with training in making these judgments with access to as much relevant information as possible are crucial for this process. Of course, policy development requires considerations other than those related to science. Such discussions should follow clear assessment after access to all of the available evidence. The scientific enterprise should stand up against efforts that distort initiatives aimed to improve scientific practice, just to pursue other agendas…(More)”.