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Legal Corner:

Safely Answering an FOIA Request

Reader Question: My laboratory received a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on our laboratory animal work. The query seemed overly invasive, leading me to believe it came from an animal-rights agitator fishing for details about our facility and staff. Must I respond personally, or should I refer this to someone else in my university, like the chief veterinarian or public-affairs officer?

Expert Comments:

Animal-rights activists commonly file both federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state open-records requests seeking to obtain information about research. In some cases these requests are sent to individual researchers. It is not recommended that individual researchers respond personally. Instead, the requests should be forwarded to the appropriate person within the researcher’s institution.

Each institution should develop a protocol and identify a point person who will be responsible for state open-records and federal FOIA requests to ensure an orderly response. Depending on the institution’s administrative structure, the point person may be someone within the office of the university counsel, the vice president or vice chancellor for research or the signing official within the grants office.

All researchers using animals should be aware of the point person and the appropriate institutional procedure for responding to a federal FOIA or state open-records request. Regardless of the point person’s official title, that individual should have a full understanding of both the federal FOIA and state open-records laws, recognize the differences between each, and carefully consider which records are not subject to disclosure or may be redacted. He or she also should also communicate with researchers so that all parties involved are aware of deadlines for responding.

The National Association for Biomedical Research’s (NABR) best-practices guide, Responding to FOIA Requests: Facts and Resources, offers guidance on the types of information commonly requested by animal-rights activists, tips for compliance without putting researchers at risk of harassment, and suggestions to assist researchers and university administrators or advisors when responding to requests. The guide is available at: http://www.nabr.org/Portals/8/Responding_to_FOIA_Requests.pdf

Comments by Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research, an organization based in Washington, D.C., that speaks for the scientific community on legislation and regulations affecting laboratory-animal research.

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