The Clinton Administration and universities have succeeded in ensuring the public will have to endure a steady stream of junk science for the foreseeable future.
Stricken from the spending bill for the Postal Service and Treasury was a provision that would have required most scientific researchers with government grants or contracts to make their data available to the public. Mind you, this would not have been a groundbreaking requirement given the scientific method requires scientific results be capable of replication with access to raw data being an important—and traditional— way to test for replicability.
The need for this legislation reached a head earlier this year when EPA (and its lackeys at Harvard University) refused to release to the public for independent review data used to support EPA's then-proposed air quality standards. At the time, The Wall Street Journal labeled this data as "secret data."
Those who oppose "data access" claim it would violate agreements to keep medical information confidential. But this is a red herring. In 1985, the National Research Council published a report titled Sharing Research Data which, while recognizing that confidentiality is a legitimate issue, recognized it was one that easily could be managed.
In the case of Harvard, those asking for data access, including the Chairman of the House Commerce Committee Rep. Thomas Bliley (R-Va), were interested in obtaining the data to see if independent scientists could reproduce the Harvard study results—not the identities of study subjects. Subject identities could easily have been redacted by Harvard (if that was their real concern).
This action ensures that government-funded scientific research will go unchecked by independent experts. The implication is scientific results will no longer have to be capable of replication. Junk science will proliferate. And real science...well... it'll probably go the way of the dinosaurs.
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