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> It is interesting that they have never heard of third party's intervening in FOIA cases because it actually is a common occurrence in academia.

They didn't say thy never heard of a third party intervening. They were more specific: he says "I have never, in fifteen years of reporting, seen a non-governmental party argue for the right to interfere in a Freedom of Information Act release of government documents." The key here is GOVERNMENT documents.

The example you give:

> Many times, a professor at another university will file a FOIA request for your grant application. If you feel your research plans are threatened by having the details of your grant passed along to this other professor, your university will intervene on your behalf in the FOIA request

is a third party intervening to try to stop a FOIA request involving their own documents. By "their own documents" I mean they wrote the documents. The documents were then submitted to the government, which is why they can be reached by FOIA, but they are not "government documents" in the sense that the writer intends, I believe. The documents MIT is trying to get involved with were written by the government. They are partially about MIT, but they are not MIT's documents in the way a grant application from MIT would be.

That's a reasonable explanation, but "we have scientific knowledge that we'd like to hide, an we're asking the government for more money to further our understanding of the subject" isn't much of an excuse. Isn't the entire rationale for providing government funding for academic research premised on the idea that scientific knowledge is a public good, to be shared freely?

The government has purposely set up the process in an adversarial manner (you must prove why you uniquely are positioned to make scientific advances here, better than anyone else), so it's not surprising that the process plays out in an adversarial manner. The government also encourages institutions to be entrepreneurial by doing things like patenting their results, or keeping them as trade secrets to hand to spinoff companies, so academia can prove its worth in the startup economy.

Is this the best way to make scientific advances? Probably not. But it's a systemic problem. There is at least one study (I believe Canadian, can't find a link currently) which found that it would be more efficient just to give every researcher in Canada some baseline funding, rather than spending all the money they currently do on the adversarial funding process.

That was actually somewhat closer to the traditional CS funding model in the U.S., though largely accidentally, through military funding. Why did someone like Richard Stallman (not an academic) get employed for decades in the MIT AI Lab? Because DARPA gave non-micromanaged block grants to the MIT AI Lab to fund a "center of excellence" for years at a time, which they were free to use to employ staff as they saw fit. Nowadays most grants are 3 years long and very specific, so it's all about positioning yourself for the next 3-year grant, if you want to keep the lights on and your staff paid.

It has to do with competition for scarce grant resources, and some researchers being cutthroats. Some of them are surprisingly petty, too.

Grant applications contain plans and guesses. If you're better positioned to capitalize on someone else's plan, they're screwed. Grant applications are submitted with at least a partial understanding of confidentiality. Because they're confidential, you can't cite them.

The first group to publish a new result gets the cookies.

"Isn't the entire rationale for providing government funding for academic research premised on the idea that scientific knowledge is a public good, to be shared freely?"

No it isn't, it's only a part of it, and only applicable in some cases. Other rationales include stimulating research on things that are considered too risky by the mainstream manufacturers, so as to facilitate radical innovations (in the Geoffrey Moore meaning of that concept). Under those circumstances, allowing patents on the results is required otherwise the people doing the research wouldn't have a reason to do it in the first place.

Plus, the grant money is only a part of the eventual results; the original ideas, the extra labor, outside financing, etc are equal contributors.

Does the researcher whose grant application is being sought need to do anything to discover the FOIA request, or does the filing automatically notify them in some manner?

Sometimes people attempt to FOIA lab notebooks. If you're a patent lawyer, you've nothing to lose by tying up a research group in knots.

It's bad news when it happens.

I thought academia couldn't get any more childish, and then here we are. Wow.

What gives you the impression that it is childish rather then just working with a system they can not change?

Issuing FOIA requests to screw over a competitor seems a bit much, right?

Then again, there may well be some aspect of this I'm missing.

There is another option, which is to do your own research and live (and die) by a personal code of ethics.

I don't believe that people "sell out," though I do believe that people "buy in." Adhering or conforming to a system you do not believe in is "buying in" to it.

It's a nice way to think about it, but you have to sell out from one system to buy into another, right?

The follow kind situation is what I think motivates fighting FOIAs:

Depending on your field a research could take a few years to develop a technique. The technique by itself will not produce a very valuable publication, but the results it can reveal could be ground breaking.

In the grant proposal, in order to convince those who are judging of the value of the technique, you detail some of the hard won technique. A competitor issues a FOIA learns the technique and may very well be able to publish the ground breaking results first.

This means years of work and funding have had considerably less benefit then anticipate. It is likely it will be a little harder to win additional grant/funding due to several apparently unproductive years on the researches part.

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." - Wallace Stanley Sayre. [aka Sayre's Law]

Would the university really be considered a separate third party given they usually hold and administer the funds for a grant and the researchers tend to be affiliated with them?