These Scientists Got To See Their Competitors’ Research Through Public Records Requests
By Teresa L. Carey and Aylin Woodward, BuzzFeed, Sept. 2, 2017
Through our own FOIA requests, BuzzFeed News obtained logs of all the FOIA requests received by two major science agencies. Over the past 10 years, the NIH, the main federal funder of biomedical research, has received more than 13,300 requests for grant proposals, these records show. In 2015 and 2016, nearly 30% of these requests came from other academic institutions.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports a wide range of science projects, received more than 1,800 requests for grant proposals between 2009 and 2016, and about half were filed by academic scientists or university officials.
In some cases — like Sherman’s, as it turns out — FOIA requests were filed by university officials keen to obtain examples of successful grants to help train their scientists to write better ones. But others came from researchers who want to find out what their competitors are planning. Although this practice is perfectly legal, many of the scientists involved were reluctant to talk about it.
Read more here.