Think Tanks' Contribution to Government Information

By Anne Barker, Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP

The panel for DGI's session on think tanks consisted of Stephen Godwin with the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies and Forrest Frank from the Institute for Defense Analyses, with the remarkably adaptive Gail Kouril pinch-hitting as moderator and an off-the-cuff representative from the RAND Corporation.

Photo by Chris Zammarelli, NOAA

Godwin began the session with a brief description of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), recounting its history as an honorific society which was created by the federal government to advise on science and technology.  The Academies are private, non-governmental organizations, which provide research services to the government on a contract basis, but which do not receive any direct federal appropriations; studies undertaken for the government are usually funded out of appropriations made to federal agencies.  The Academies do not compete for open projects with private industry.

Due to their organizational structure, one important function of the Academies is the ability to convene meetings between government and industry representatives that would be illegal for a private company to arrange.  Academy studies are conducted by a balanced panel of experts who seek to reach consensus judgments, that are subject to a rigorous peer review process and that are completely independent of government influence.

Their work for the government is cyclical in nature, varying with public policy attention and interest.  Godwin noted that they have seen a downward trend in the amount of government research projects since 2001, perhaps due to the lack of scientific interest in the last administration.  He also noted that the impact of their research depends upon the audience and timing; for example, in 2001 they did a report on climate change science for President Bush, but the report had no impact on the administration.

Photo by Chris Zammarelli, NOAA

Forrest Frank concentrated his time on what he believes is a pressing issue for all federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs): the increased generation of grey literature.  Frank noted that, in the past, the work of the FFRDCs fell within the access policies of the federal government and that all of the FFRDCs could see the research being produced by the other national labs.  The FFRDCs and the Academies provided quality information, including details on how the research was conducted.

But he has seen a noticeable change in recent years; government sponsors seem to have lost interest in providing access to high quality research projects.  They are too concerned about national security, and fear it would put people at risk if they exposed details about their research.  While this is a legitimate concern, Frank believes a lot of the information could be segmented and released.

Since the government sponsors aren't interested in publishing the research, local leadership at the FFRDCs isn't demanding it either, and peer review of the research has dropped off.  As a result, researchers seldom write articles on their research and, when they do, it becomes hidden and inaccessible even within the FFRDC system.  In order to build knowledge, scientists must explain how they reached their conclusions, describing the processes and how the instrumentation was calibrated; science and scholarship depends on understanding what came before.

Frank noted that the IDA web site has almost no information on it by design.  He thinks the RAND Corporation web site is quite good and informative, but it probably discloses less then half of the research they do, and the same could be said of MITRE, SANDIA, etc.

Frank believes that this creates two challenges for special librarians and SLA.  First, people often assume the information coming out of the national labs is high quality.  If we can no longer rely on this assumption, librarians are critical in teaching people who provides reliable research; it places a greater premium on the ability to ferret out the good stuff and educate people on what is good and what is bad.

Second, Frank believes that SLA needs to press the Office of Science and Technology Policy on what they are going to do to implement and oversee an open science community.  Frank thinks that DTIC is broken; the data isn’t current or comprehensive, so people don’t use it, and people are not punished when they fail to put information into the system.

Researchers and the public are not getting the full benefit of the scientific system.  Frank believes that the lack of peer review in the FFRDCs is a major factor in the current failings of the government acquisition process.  If researchers don’t have access to peer-reviewed research detailing the scientific process and results, it is no surprise that problems with acquisition projects aren’t being discovered until they are already well into production.

In response to a question, Godwin acknowledged that there is more grey literature than there used to be.  Reports that would have been 100% public before 9/11 are now under pressure to be withheld and are being designated "Sensitive, but Unclassified."

Frank believes a reasonable step in fixing some of the current access problems would be a catalog containing metadata that shows where the information is located and what restrictions are in place.

Think Tanks' Contribution to Government Information was presented by the Government Information Division and co-sponsored by the Social Science Division.  It was sponsored by Gale, a division of Cengage Learning.