Abstract/Résumé/Resumen
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. This sentence was uttered by Louis Brandeis, associate justice of the American Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939, and applies to the growing belief that transparency is an essential aspect in the proper functioning of public institutions. With the implementation of Law 12527/11, the Brazilian government moved one step closer in the direction of its fulfillment, as the law’s primary goal is to grant full access to the body of information related to the acts of the public sector. In the present work, with the implementation of questionnaires at the Citizen Information Service (CISs/SICs in Portuguese) at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Information – MSTI (MCTI in Portuguese) and the research units connected to it, we aim to outline a brief background on how those institutions have been working, in practice, towards implementing the Access Law. This law created the SICs as an interface between society and public institutions. A year and a half after the implementation of the Law of Access to Information, the services have taken upon themselves several roles: Not only answering society’s demands by structuring and organizing a new logic of access, but also implementing and disseminating the policy of announcing the availability of documents within its institutions. Throughout the answers (or the lack of them) forwarded by the institutions, we wish to outline a concrete scenario of the advances and difficulties faced in this process.
