Who Owns Data Gathered by UK Universities?

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Apr 23, 2010

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Fortunately, when I write a story, I'm a bit anal about going to read the source materials. So when I came across a Slashdot post by Sara Chan claiming that "scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property," I hunted down the ruling in question and gave it a read.

The Issue

Since 2007, mathematician Douglas J. Keenan has been trying to get access to tree ring data compiled by Queen's University Belfast. After repeated attempts to get a response, he was finally told that they didn't have to send him the information because by the rules of the Freedom of Information Act, it was too expensive to process his request. (I'm going to ignore the issue of why he wants the data here. Why is not the point.)

After much back and forth, which you can read in full for yourself here, the Information Commissioner agreed to review whether the request had been wrongly denied. During the review, the Commissioner was told first that the request was too expensive to process. Finding no problem with the refusal, the Commissioner upheld the university's decision.

Where it Gets Interesting

After some additional discussions, the Commissioner agreed to look again. Since tree ring data is environmental information (due to the fact that you can learn about the state of the environment where the tree grew by studying its rings), Keenan's request should actually be considered under Environmental Information Regulations 2004, not Freedom of Information.

The university agreed to review the request again under the EIR and yet again declined. This time the reasons given were that they should be able to withhold the information under the following exceptions:

Regulation 12(4)(d) – "Information that is unfinished or in the course of completion"
Regulation 12(5)(c) – "Intellectual property rights"
Regulation 12(5)(e) – "Commercially confidential information"

They also claimed that "there was 'negligible' public interest in disclosing the requested information given that it did not relate to issues of national/regional debate, public safety or decisions taken by QUB that directly affected the public. However the risk of harm to QUB through disclosure of the information was of greater significance."

After a change in staff, the Information Commissioner's office agreed to review the case again. The Commissioner was particularly interested in "why, having initially refused the request on the grounds of cost under section 12 of the Act, there was no mention of costs or time considerations when the request had been considered under the EIR."

In response, the university said that it thought it should be exempt "on the grounds that the request was manifestly unreasonable." They claimed that the data would be "meaningless to the complaintant" due to how it was stored and organized. In addition to 11,000 individual tree samples and physical files, there were also 50 to 500 measurements for individual growth rings for each sample kept on floppy disks.

Shady Dealings

Originally the university claimed that it would take a full year for a full-time employee to copy all of the data. Keenan had already stated that he would be satisfied with just a copy of the electronic data. Instead of the 150 disks that the university claimed they had, there were only 67, containing 150 folders of data. The Commissioner determined that it would take about 12.5 hours to make a complete copy. This action was not deemed a significant burden.There is also nothing in the regulations that say that someone has to say how they'll use the data, so the university couldn't say that it was useless. (From here I'm going to hit the high points, if you want every detail, have some caffeine to stay awake while you read the report yourself.)