BP removes restrictions on scientists' publications

NOAA... leads the so-called Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), the legal process during which the government and BP collect evidence on the extent of the oil's impact—evidence that will factor, eventually, into BP's liability.

Now, in a largely unexpected and welcome move, BP has revised its contracts to remove these restrictions. And with NOAA relaxing its own restrictions on publishing assessment data, scientists are hopeful that the NRDA process will be less adversarial than they'd feared. A sample contract provided to Science by BP allows signers to publish "written research papers, presentations and similar documents reporting any environmental data obtained or produced" as a consultant after giving BP 30 days' notice and a copy of the intended publication.

The change comes after a public cry of outrage sparked by a damning story in the 16 July Mobile, Alabama, Press-Register that blasted BP for "buying up" gulf scientists by the department.

During the first part of the NRDA, which involves taking baseline data and determining whether resources have been harmed, BP and the trustees have—for the most part—been working together, even sending scientists out on the same boats to take a single set of samples. "If you're out in a marsh assessing a shoreline, and you're on a boat together, and you agree on how [samples] are going to be collected, what that marsh looks like in that data, you're a lot further along."

After being lambasted with phone calls from a concerned public, and given that BP was seeing the data anyway, NOAA decided on 8 July that it would post its vetted data online and began doing so in a matter of weeks