TheMillerCircle.org

A disturbing, but not surprising report recently appeared in Inside Higher Ed, written by Carry Nelson, president of the AAUP who did a little investigative reporting on his own to chase down a story about how BP executives are recruiting scientists in the Gulf area who are likely to carry out research on the gulf oil spill. Scientists hired by BP cannot publish their findings until BP gives approval and may not publish them at all if their reports are damaging to BP’s interests. BP scientists cannot publish their work unless BP has access to it first and vets it for open distribution. Carry Nelson properly sees this behavior as a violation of academic freedom in which all scientists and all scientific knowledge of the spill should be available through open access and the concept of free information exchange; shared knowledge should follow the traditional rules of open access and transparency and should appear in peer-reviewed journals, not specialized oil and gas journals of dubious but certain motivation. Furthermore all knowledge generated by scientific studies should be available to the public and not purged through a BP filter, whose handling of such data will depend on their impressions about BP’s image. We should not allow scientific studies to become part of BP’s damage control. But, BP has done this before. By restricting as much scientific knowledge as possible, BP hopes to reduce its liability over long-term oil exposure and dispersant application.

We won’t know the true impact of the oil spill on the animal life in the Gulf of Mexico for many years to come. This is because the entire area has a rich endogenous sea life, but it is also an area where many migratory fish, birds and other aquatic life come through during their migratory movements, so evaluating the full scope of this problem will mean years of study. Should any part of that body of knowledge be funded by BP and kept secret, it would be a travesty against  scientific principles of discovery and dissemination of scientific information. For BP, the only thing sacred is the image of its giant corporation, linked to its profitability. BP’s behavior in securing scientists who will have limited capacity to fully reveal their findings makes a mockery of science itself and paints a very unfortunate image of those scientists who agree to carry out studies under such constrained reporting circumstances and under a cloud where their own work will be tainted with the possibility that it’s been diluted or altered for consumption by corporate interests rather than public health and freedom of scientific exchange. In my opinion, any scientific research supported by BP that is related to this spill should not be admissible in peer-reviewed journals. Indeed, it is up to reviewers of any papers submitted to such journals to evaluate the source of their funding and determine whether there is an ethical violation of a corporate-sponsored study that does not give full disclosure. This is not merely a problem with BP and the oil industry. We see this kind of behavior with the pharmaceutical industry, which tries to manipulate reports so that only the most favorable outcomes are highlighted. I’m afraid it will take a much higher level of awareness by the public to learn how to evaluate starkly conflicting reports, when one is published in a peer-review journal and is funded by an unbiased sources, such as the National Science Foundation vs results published by an oil consortium, with a fancy title, but nevertheless funded by the oil giants. You don’t have to go beyond Congress to see which reports are favored by which major party.
RFM