David Boak denies restricted access

Dear Tom,
I write in response to your open letter to Lord Rees.

The Royal Society received extensive national and international recognition for the consultative manner in which, together with the Royal Academy of Engineering, it conducted the nanosciences and nanotechnologies study in 2003/2004. The report was seen by many as a watershed in the way in which policy studies should be conducted. The methodology used in this study was developed from earlier work the Society had done in its Science in Society programme. As we indicate in the report to which you refer, the early years of the programme involved exploring different methodologies and learning lessons from these trials. We acknowledge in the report that methodological approaches were improved as a result.

Our report, The Impact and legacy of the 5 year Kohn Foundation funded Science in Society programme, covers the final years of the programme and was not intended as an academic document. However, the University of East Anglia team to which you refer has submitted a paper for publication based on its evaluation of our 2002/3 dialogue programme. (An earlier report Science in Society (2004) examines the 2002/2003 period in some depth.)

As you know, PEALS (Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Institute) was under contract from the Royal Society to assist with the delivery of the 2002/2003 programme, for which you were paid a fee. The terms of that contract did not ban PEALS from publishing or disseminating any analysis of the Speaking Out workshops. And the notion that access to the reports of these meetings was restricted by some Intellectual Property arrangement is not borne out by the fact that they were available for a prolonged period of time on our web site.

Dr David Stewart Boak is Director of Communications at the Royal Society