FOI as a Research Tool

This project featured a webinar series in autumn 2022, ahead of an in-person workshop in March 2023. Expert speakers discussed the use of FOI for various research purposes in different jurisdictions around the world, including the UK, the European Union and the USA. A series of blog posts were published to provide an overview of the presentations.

The project was led by Dr Kathrin Lauber, Dr Eleanor Brooks and Dr Rob Ralston of the Global Health Policy Unit at the University of Edinburgh.

The team has created a mailing list that provides a forum for researchers to share examples and resources related to FOI. To join the mailing list, please email Dr Kathrin Lauber: kathrin.lauber@ed.ac.uk.

Outputs

Journal article in Critical Public Health

Following the in-person workshop that was organised as part of this innovation forum, a group of researchers including the organisers co-authored an editorial published in Critical Public Health outlining the research challenges that were discussed at the event.

In their article, the researchers argue that FOI laws remain underutilised as a research tool. They highlight examples of some of the difficulties encountered by health-policy researchers in the UK seeking to use FOI requests to access information held by public bodies, and the issues these raise for both scholarship and democratic oversight.

Read the article, The law of diminishing returns? The challenge of using freedom of information legislation for health policy research.

Summaries of the webinars

The below blog posts summarise the key points from the three webinars.

• Why FOI requests are a powerful but under-used research tool
• Freedom of information at the EU – who can access what and how?
• Navigating FOI in the UK