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Horn: ‘broad agreement’ on need for exemption.

The US Congress was poised at the beginning of this week to exempt the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) from the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), ending a year of uncertainty about how the academy prepares scientific and technical advice for the US government.

In the early hours of Monday, the House of Representatives passed a bill allowing the exemption, while requiring the academy to take several steps to open up its processes to the public. The Senate was expected quickly to pass a similar bill, which President Bill Clinton is ready to sign into law.

Congress has responded with unusual haste after a Supreme Court decision last week left the academy complex facing restrictions which Bruce Alberts, the president of the academy, said would prevent it from functioning independently of the government.

Committees organized by the academy would be more open to public scrutiny under the planned legislation. But the National Research Council (NRC), the executive arm of the academy, would still appoint and manage its own study committees, which academy officials have always said is their top priority.

As expected, the Supreme Court had refused to consider an appeal by the NAS against the decision of a lower court forcing NRC committees to operate under the rules of FACA (see Nature 386, 309; 1997). Those rules include allowing public attendance at most meetings, and giving federal agency employees responsibility for the setting up and management of advisory committees.

Academy officials argued that placing NRC committees under the direct control of federal officials whose programmes are under scrutiny would compromise their independence.

Having lost in the courts, the academy has taken its case to Congress. Stephen Horn (Republican, California), who chairs a House of Representatives subcommittee in charge of government management issues, was largely responsible for drafting legislation exempting the NAS from the act.

At a hearing last week, Horn said there was “broad agreement” in both houses of Congress and in the Clinton administration to grant such an exemption.

But the academy has promised to take some steps to open its operations to the public. The names, biographies and brief conflict-of-interest disclosure statements of each member of an academy study panel would be posted on the Internet.

The public would then have a period, perhaps 20 days, in which to comment. It would be “totally up to the academy's discretion” what to do with those comments, says William Colglazier, the NRC's executive director.

The names and biographies of external reviewers who evaluate completed NRC reports before they are released would also be posted. At present, the reviewers are anonymous, and Colglazier admits that releasing their names might make it more difficult to recruit volunteer reviewers. The academy would encourage public attendance at committee fact-finding meetings (which are already open) by posting notices on the Internet. Meetings involving internal deliberations of a committee or report writing would remain closed.

Alberts said at last week's hearing that these measures would “let as much sunshine in as possible without changing the independent nature of the advice that we give”.

Christopher Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) calls the academy's concessions to openness “a step in the right direction”. The NRDC successfully sued to prevent the Department of Energy from using an academy study on its planned National Ignition Facility earlier this year on the grounds that it had not operated under the act's rules (see Nature 385, 755; 1997).

But Paine would like to see all NRC meetings open to outside observers and to have greater public accountability in the composition of the council's committees.

Paine's group will release a report this week detailing what he calls an “egregious failure” in the academy's system of internal controls in connection with the report on the ignition facility.

According to the NRDC, the energy department disbanded its own advisory panel and solicited the academy report instead because it thought it might be more favourable to the facility.