According to Washington Top News, The Smithsonian has said that it will implement a raft of policy changes recommended by Rita Colwell, the former director of the National Science Foundation and currently professor at the University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Colwell was brought in after it was revealed that a science paper published by Wei-Hock Soon failed to declare a conflict of interest between his paper’s findings and the body that funded his research.
Soon had written research which overturned conventional thinking on climate change, disassociating any changes to temperature from the use of fossil fuels. However,environmental groups, including Greenpeace, produced documents that showed Dr. Soon’s funding had come from the fossil-fuel industry (including Southern Company, a coal-burning utility.) Soon had not declared any conflict of interest in his scientific papers. This led his work being open to the charge that the funding organizations had influenced the outcomes.
The Smithsonian is a group of museums and research centers, overseen by the U.S. government. It is the largest museum and research group in the world.
The exact form the the new policies has yet to be revealed. However, the New York Times speculates that these will consist of measures to prevent “outside funders, such as corporations, from exercising undue influence over the findings of its studies.” In addition, new instructions are “also likely to require strict disclosure of funding sources, going beyond the requirements of most other academic institutions and scientific journals.”
