SRA deletion requests
Tracking # |
56616 |
Submitted | June 23, 2021 |
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Communications
From: Chris Peterson
To Whom It May Concern:
Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the following records:
— copies of any emailed requests (and responses), made to the staff of Sequence Read Archive (SRA), maintained by the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information, to delete SARS-COV-2 sequencing runs from the archives. An example of one such representative request is figure 2 of https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1.full.pdf+html.
The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.
In the event that there are fees, 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,
Chris Peterson
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Chris Peterson,
The status of your FOIA request #56616 has been updated to the following status 'Received'. To log into the NIH FOIA Public Portal click on the Application URL below.
https://foiaportal.nih.gov
Sincerely,
National Institutes of Health
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Chris Peterson, This is an automated message from the NIH FOIA Request Portal. Your submission has been received by the National Institutes of Health. NIH will review your request and contact you regarding next steps. Regards, National Institutes of Health, FOIA Program
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Chris Peterson,
The status of your FOIA request #56616 has been updated to the following status 'Assigned for Processing'. To log into the NIH FOIA Public Portal click on the Application URL below.
https://foiaportal.nih.gov
Sincerely,
National Institutes of Health
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Mr. Peterson,
Please see the attached correspondence regarding your FOIA request, NIH/NLM received June 29, 2021. We will contact you again if we learn of any questions or have additional information to share about the processing of your request.
Sincerely, NikkiMeadows [C], PhD
Policy Analyst
Freedom of Information and Privacy Act Branch/FOIA ServiceCenter National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), NIH Kelly Government Solutions danielle.meadows@nih.gov (mailto:danielle.meadows@nih.gov)
Rockledge I, 4 th Floor, MSC 7957 T: 301-496-9737
From: National Institutes of Health
Hi Mr. Peterson,
We've started working on your recent FOIA request to submitted to NLM on June 29, 2021 (please see attached for details). In light of Dr. Bloom's recent preprint on bioRxiv and the media coverage surrounding it, our office has received quite a few requests for various documents related to the SARS-CoV2 sequences removed from the SRA database. In an effort to make responding to these requests more efficient and expedient, I was wondering if you would be willing to amend your request to "all the communications regarding the deletion of sequences from project PRJNA612766 from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA)". Narrowing your request will result in you receiving your documents much more quickly because we will be able to process them much faster. If you find that after receiving the narrowed document set that you still want additional documents, you always have the option to submit another request with your expanded parameters.
Please let me know in writing if you're willing to narrow your request. If you have any questions or wish to discuss further, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Thank you,
Nikki
Nikki Meadows [C], PhD
Policy Analyst
Freedom of Information and Privacy Act Branch/FOIA Service Center
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), NIH
Kelly Government Solutions
danielle.meadows@nih.gov<mailto:danielle.meadows@nih.gov>
Rockledge I, 4th Floor, MSC 7957
T: 301-496-9737
From: Chris Peterson
Hi Nikki —
Thank you for your thoughtful email. I can understand that Dr. Bloom's paper might have caused a great deal of work for you and your team, and I appreciate your followup.
My research interest is actually somewhat different than some of the requests I suspect you might be getting. I work in comparative open records research (see e.g. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6944). While I suspect that most of the requests you have gotten are focused on this specific deletion — based on the discourse I've seen, because they want to see if there was anything "nefarious" about it — I'm actually more interested in a comparative look at all the deletion requests to see why people ask for things to be deleted. I'm not sure if there is a academic paper in it, but who knows, there might be.
Because of this, I'm inclined to keep my request as-is, but certainly expect that you would de-prioritize my more comprehensive request in favor of the more specific requests you've gotten concerned with PRJNA612766 alone. Does that sound reasonable to you, and is there any way I can amend my request to lighten the load on you and your team while still getting the documents I'm hoping for?
Best,
— Chris
From: National Institutes of Health
Hi Mr. Peterson,
We have reached out to you several times.
From: National Institutes of Health
Hi Mr. Peterson,
We still have not heard back from you in response to our August 4, 2021 email regarding changes to your fee category and the estimate for us to respond to your FOIA request submitted to NLM on June 29, 2021. Prior to that we had reached out several times and have had no response to those emails either.
It has been more than 30 working days since our last email to you. As described in the August 4 email, we now consider your request withdrawn and will close it out this afternoon.
Thank you,
Nikki Meadows [C], PhD
Policy Analyst
Freedom of Information and Privacy Act Branch/FOIA Service Center
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), NIH
Kelly Government Solutions
danielle.meadows@nih.gov<mailto:danielle.meadows@nih.gov>
Rockledge I, 4th Floor, MSC 7957
T: 301-496-9737
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Chris Peterson,
The status of your FOIA request #56616 has been updated to the following status 'Assigned for Processing'. To log into the NIH FOIA Public Portal click on the Application URL below.
https://foiaportal.nih.gov
Sincerely,
National Institutes of Health
From: National Institutes of Health
Dear Chris Peterson,
The status of your FOIA request #56616 has been updated to the following status 'Closed'. To log into the NIH FOIA Public Portal click on the Application URL below.
https://foiaportal.nih.gov
Sincerely,
National Institutes of Health
From: Chris Peterson
Hi Nikki —
I just logged back into Muckrock to see the status of this request. I'm sorry that you were unable to reach out to me — I'm not sure why Muckrock ceased forwarding the requests to my system. That is very strange, and I will contact the Muckrock staff to see why that happened.
I just wanted to reach out and tell you I'm sorry for what must have appeared to be me either ignoring or not caring about your request. It wasn't that; I just figured it was at the back of your priority queue and so I didn't want to reach out and bother you more.
I'm not going to resubmit my request (yet) because I'm slammed with work and teaching this fall and won't be able to follow up on this research in the short term anyway. But again, thank you so much for all you do to support FOIA requests.
Best,
— Chris
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