The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued the final version of the rules allowing members of the general public access to data from federally funded research. The new rules, mandated by a measure quietly inserted into a Senate appropriations bill last year ( Nature Med. 5, 8; 1999) applies to all research funded by the federal government after 8 November 1999. Although the OMB rules seem to address many of the concerns voiced by scientists when the legislation was passed, some observers are fearful that the new regulations will still be abused by special-interest groups.

“OMB has done probably about the best job we could have expected given the way the law was worded. They have made some very constructive steps,” Wendy Baldwin, deputy director of extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, told Nature Medicine. The original legislation, apparently inserted into the appropriations bill at the request of industries stung by new environmental protection rules, targets research cited to support new federal regulations.

Under the law, the OMB was required to amend its rules to place such data under the Freedom of Information Act, which would allow any citizen to request copies of the raw data used to support a researcher's conclusions. In its final ruling, the OMB specifically excluded data that could identify individual subjects in clinical research and data from studies that are awaiting publication, two areas that had raised concern among researchers.

Although the rules do narrow the scope of the law marginally, scientists whose research has been cited in federal rule-making in the past are still uneasy. “Under this regulation, there are still a multitude of ways that special interests can exploit the promulgated rules to slow or avoid the use of scientific information that they don't like,” claims George Thurston, a professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at New York University. Thurston says that in the past, companies have tried to bury researchers in lawsuits and information requests, and the new rules will provide additional ammunition for such attacks.