Nearly 20 working days ago I FOI’ed 10 Russell group universities about their contracts and practices of content-mining and their relations with researchers and publishers. Over half have responded – the others have a day or two left. In summary the responses vary from very helpful to useless.
FOI is a formal process. Universities have to reply but they don’t have to do my work for me. In an ideal situation they would have all the information to hand and simply post a link to the relevant documents or summarise in a sentence. There’s an allocation of up to 450 GBP / 18 hours for the effort required.It’s acknowledged that some answers may require a lot of work and the universities can refuse to do this unless they are paid extra. It’s potentially reasonable to either ask me for extra money above the 450 GBP or to bundle unanalysed documents and ask me to extract my own information. It’s also allowable to say that the university doesn’t hold the information (but they have to be convincing) or to refuse because of confidentiality. I was expecting a wide range and I got it. As I have only done 40% of Russell I will refine my questions (e.g. I should probably have routed questions to Edinburgh’s central University library).
Let me again thank MySociety for WhatDoTheyKnow. It’s just brilliant. I don’t have to manage my email – all the correspondence is trivially available and shared with the whole world. I can see, for example, that Durham have got 6 hours to reply in. (Some universities routinely leave it till the last day). Here’s the summary – the links are to WDTK. In general the “Successful” are what can be reasonably given under FOI. There is a bit of SirHumprheyism in some – especially in arguing that it would be too costly to ask everyone in the whole university. But others have been positively helpful. My summary:
Cambridge: First class honours (not because I’m in Cambridge)
Cardiff, Exeter: Upper seconds
Bristol, Edinburgh, Kings: Played the “money” card, whereas they could have been more helpful with little effort. Technically OK. but…
Glasgow. “We don’t know anything”. Oh dear. I offered them a resit. They still failed.
Here are the links. You can also add comments for the universities: