This article was originally published in the Student Press Report , a national news desk highlighting the successes and challenges facing college journalism.

Government officials have found a trick to keep the public from seeing what they are up to: They don’t always have to say no. They can simply make getting the records so difficult that nobody wants to try.

I spent the better part of a year fighting UMass Boston’s attempts to do just that when I requested access to public records for an investigation into the university’s involvement in a Vatican climate initiative published in the campus newspaper, The Mass Media, earlier this year. At each opportunity, administrators missed legal deadlines , claimed frivolous exemptions that the state’s supervisor of records rejected or questioned and charged fees that exceeded $1,000 .

In other words, they did everything they could to make my reporting slower, harder and more costly — and not just to the paper’s budget.…