Critics say an EPA rule may restrict science used for public health regulations
In science, transparency is typically considered a virtue. But a rule proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, billed as a means to keep environmental regulations rooted in reproducible science, is getting pushback from the scientific community. The proposal, titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would require studies that factor into EPA rule-making to be based on publicly available data. Doing so, the agency argues, would ensure that other researchers could access that data and verify the findings of any study. The EPA administrator would be able to handpick allowances for studies whose data cannot be made public. But according to a Nov. 12 EPA news release, “this should be the exception instead of the way of EPA doing business.” That stipulation has some scientists worried that EPA regulations may then be able to ignore relevant evidence from many studies based on private information. Among the critics are editors of six major scientific journals — Science, Nature, Cell, the Proceedings of...