Status Report:Scientific Inquiry and Research Subcommittee

October 28, 2014

Membership• Suzanne Bell • Jeff Salyards (co-

chair)• Cecelia Crouse• Mark Weiss• Stephen Fienberg• Marilyn Huestis• Gerald LaPorte• Mark LeBeau• Jeff Tomberlin

• Jeff Tomberlin• Jeremy Triplett• John Butler• Tom Cecht• Bonner Denton• Ed Huesky• Karen Kafadar

Progress since last meeting

•Drafts of Views document via email•Conference call•Finalized •Voted and it was unanimous

Directions for near future

• Respond to comments for Views Document and finalize• Directive document #1: Share the Views document with

OSACs and request feedback•Overall “mission statement” for the subcommittee• Directives document #2: Establish an office in DOJ to

coordinate and follow-through on Directives (NAS Recommendation 1):

Recommendation 1 (c ): promoting scholarly competitive peer-reviewed research and technical development in forensic science disciplines and forensic medicine

Current Work product

•Motivation for creating it•Mechanism we used•Voted as a subcommittee to move forward reserving option to address public comments•Decided to respond in writing in a public document to all comments received•Summary of public comments to date

“The technical issues addressed in this document would be better addressed by the appropriate OSACs”

“We strongly support this document. It provides an important corrective to a recent trend toward treating the compilation of bibliographies as tantamount to demonstrating either: (1) the reliability of various forensic knowledge claims; or (2) the scientific status of a discipline. Such compilations would seem to betray a misunderstanding of both the National Research Councils call for the forensic disciplines to establish their scientific foundations and the nature of the scientific enterprise itself.”

“…As to the Scientific Literature Support of Forensic Science and Practice, the IAI (along with a number of other forensic associations) regularly publish peer-reviewed journals that reflect on-going scientific research into a number of forensic disciplines represented by our organization. We sense, however, that the Commission doesn't feel our association (and possibly others) adequately meet a standard as defined in this draft. We are further concerned that moving the publication of said journals to the private sector (i.e. Medline, Google Scholar, Xplore) puts the credibility of publications at some risk. Finally, we believe that indexing of journals is beyond the needs of the forensics community.