'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The Iraq poll: information as property?

It has come to my attention that at least some bona fide researchers who sent an email to Oxford Research International to request the "press packet" of materials that I referred to in a couple of posts last week had this request rejected.

Dr. Silvia Iacuzzi of ORI wrote one researcher the following (apparently generic) letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your interest.

I regret to inform you that further to misuses and wrong quotations, we
are not releasing any further information regarding the survey in Iraq
for the time being.

However, you may want to consult the BBC website
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3254028.stm).

Best regards,

Silvia Iacuzzi

I would be interested to more about Iacuzzi's specific charge of "misuses and wrong quotations." And btw, don't bother rushing to the BBC story she references, which is the highly inadequate piece of reporting by Barnaby Mason that I referred to in this post.

The more I thought about it, however, the more puzzled and upset I became about the idea that information like that gathered by the researchers of the ORI/Oxford University team-- in coordination with researchers from the Universities of Dohuk and Baghdad, in Iraq-- should in any way be considered "proprietary".

To my mind, this kind of information is vital for international peace and security. Decisions taken on the basis of having or not having such information could result in the loss of scores of thousands of lives and all the rest of the human suffering that is associated with war.

If people think-- quite rightly, imho-- that vital lifesaving information in the pharmaceutical realm should be made available to those AIDS-sufferers and others who need it regardless of so-called "intellectual property" concerns, then why not the information that ORI and its university collaborators have collected?

Another issue. When the 3,244 Iraqi women and men who graciously gave of their time to answer the lengthy list of questions asked by the researchers, were they made fully aware that the answers they gave would be aggregated into a proprietary product over which neither they nor any democratically accountable body would subsequently have any control, but which would be controlled by a private company in far-off Britain?

Or, when these Iraqis graciously gave of their time etc., were they doing so based on some hope--not disabused by the poll-takers--that their voices would be heard, and would be aggregated into a report which would be part of the global discourse on war and peace issues in their country?

If the latter, then I would say that if ORI now seeks to exercize proprietary control over the results of the poll it is guilty of a serious breach of basic research ethics, and also a serious breach of the trust of the Iraqi respondents to its poll-- as perhaps too, of that of many of the Iraqi poll-takers themselves, if they were also not fully aware of the terms under which the project was being conducted.

Comments? Further ideas?