In the wake of a May memorandum in which the National Science Board (NSB) called for the Bush administration to issue a “government-wide directive” to encourage the “open exchange of data and results of research conducted by [government] scientists,” a spokesman for presidential science adviser John Marburger said no evidence exists “that the situation requires the development of a mandatory one-size-fits-all government-wide policy.”
Benjamin Fallon, Marburger’s legislative affairs assistant at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that after a January incident in which a NASA official tried to prevent agency scientist James Hansen from publicly discussing climate change research, Marburger “took a hard look at the question of the communication of scientific information.” Marburger, director of OSTP, was pleased by the new scientific communication guidelines NASA developed in response to the Hansen incident, Fallon said, “and he issued a letter to every chief scientist government-wide recommending the [NASA]...
