Christopher Gillberg has been found guilty

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Well, as the title says. I've been trying to find an article in English on this whole thing; however, I haven't been very successful. Try to look it up if you can.

PS- It would help if you could read Swedish

I'm not Familiar with this, what did he do ?

Well, apparently, a paediatrician and a sociologist (both, as I have heard, are rumored to be some kind of religious fanatics) requested to review Dr. Gillberg's research. He refused. They took him to court. The courts decided, since the university at which he works is a public place, that this fell under some kind of freedom of the press or other and ruled Gillberg had to hand over all his research.

Gillberg refused on moral grounds because his patients' names and confidential information were all listed in there. So Gillberg, the Vice President of the Uni, and another big wig on campus destroyed all of Gillberg's research in the archives.

Gillberg was taken to court and found guilty of something along the lines of obstructing the law, etc. Now he has to pay fines.

And apparently, those three gentlemen are in trouble with the uni, too, because it is against their rules to destroy any archived information.

Most of the medical and research community seems to be heavily on Gillberg's side, saying they would have done the same thing.

I'm just shaking my head at the stupid court decision. Now, no one will be very willing to take part in research in the future for fear that any yokel can walk off the street and request all that information.

Idiots.

Ouch, that may very well set back research in Sweden and perhaps the EC, but
I doubt (This is an uneducated guess) that this may have repercussions on US research.

I asked my mother if this could ever happen in the US since she used to do some research in graduate school for Psychology and she just laughed and said "Yeah right. If anybody came in and requested research information, they'd be laughed right out into the hall, down the corridor, and through the doors of the university."

Privacy is too precious in the US. If it ever came to court, the judges would most likely be too afraid to rule in favor of the yokels coming in off the street with the audacity of requesting the such a thing.

We probably have some law already in place which prohibits that. Who knows.

Heh, well they are obviously requesting information through the wrong means...

Find the right person and the right price, and any information is available.



Still, whats the point in having any sort of research if it isn't available to look at? I mean without people being able to examine it, how can you even prove that it was legit?

I've been watching these boards for some time, but I had to register so I could respond to this. In the US, research data, even at a public institution, is generally considered private to the researcher until the publication of the research. In many cases, the data does become public after a set amount of time whether there has been a publication or not. An exampe of this would be data from the Hubble Space Telescope (even though I am a computer programmer, I have a degree in astrophysics and have done analysis on satellite data). With the HST, data is kept private for 1 year, after which it is released to the public.

In the case of psychological testing, the subjects are usually given an identifier instead of their real name, such as a number or letter. The identities of the subjects normally cannot be released without concent from the subjects. Of course this is not really legally encoded per se, but normally a test subject has to sign a number of documents stating that they are a willing test subject (look up the Nuremberg Trials for information on why this is), and in those documents is usually a form that says that the personal information will not be given out by the researcher. That is a contract, and because that has been put in there the researcher cannot just give out the information. A researcher will give out this information (with consent, of course) to another researcher who wishes to do a follow up study or wishes to look at the results from a different angle, but it is unlikely that the researcher will give out this information to John Q. Public.

If a researcher disagrees with the conclusions that another researcher has come up with -- such as a corelation between variable A and variable B -- he will usually just conduct another study trying to corelate variable A with variable C, but including variable B in the data, rather than use the other researcher's data.

Ah, thank you for the info, Paul. And nice to see you here.