NIH Certificates of Confidentiality

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. I hereby request the following records:

All applications for a Certificate of Confidentiality and all accompanying rejection or acceptance letters from one (1) year prior to the date that this request is processed.

I also request that, if appropriate, fees be waived as I believe this request is in the public interest. The requested documents will be made available to the general public free of charge as part of the public information service at MuckRock.com, processed by a representative of the news media/press and is made in the process of news gathering and not for commercial usage.

In the event that fees cannot be waived, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

George LeVines

Susan,

I will make an attempt to call you at the provided number tomorrow around 10am.

Thank you,

George

Susan,

As per our phone conversation this email is a summary of what we discussed.

You:

- Certificate of Confidentiality applications are not centralized at NIH. - Some divisions are handling them electronically while some are still using paper applications. For the departments handling applications electronically there are 500 some records.
- Certificates are sometimes given even if the researcher is not receiving government funding which would require NIH to reach out to said researchers in order to provide an opportunity for them to withhold any proprietary information (this could significantly increase the request's response time).
- You mentioned that you would reach out to the media office to see if I could get in touch with someone who processes these applications in order to learn more about them to better perfect my request.

Me:
- I requested a blank example application to better perfect my request, which you said should be easy to provide.

Please correct me if any of these details are wrong.

Thank you for your time,

George

Susan,

The researcher's name is Elizabeth Letourneau, she operates out of Johns Hopkins University.

Thanks again,

George