Dear Eddie I hope you have had a restful and very well deserved Christmas break. While you were on leave, I left a message to let you know that we had received another application under the NSW freedom of information legislation, the NSW Government Information (Public Access) Act (the GIPA Act), for information about your work. This is quite an extensive application by a public health research organisation based in the United States, US Rightto Know. It is asking for the following:"We are requesting records of correspondence specifically in relation to following research projects of Professor Holmes:1. Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, *Edward C. Holmes*, and Robert F. Garry. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. _Nature Medicine_ 26, 450-452 (2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-92. Hong Zhou, Xing Chen, Tao Hu, Juan Li, Hao Song, Yanran Liu, Peihan Wang, Di Liu, Jing Yang, *Edward C.Holmes*, Alice C. Hughes, Yuhai Bi, and Weifeng Shi. A novel bat coronavirus closely related to SARS-CoV-2 contains natural insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site of the spike protein*.* _Current Biology_ 30: 2196-2203(2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.0233. Tommy Tsan-Yuk Lam, Na Jia, Ya-Wei Zhang, Marcus Ho-Hin Shum, Jia-Fu Jiang, Hua-Chen Zhu, Yi-GangTong, Yong-Xia Shi, Xue-Bing Ni, Yun-Shi Liao, Wen-Juan Li, Bao-Gui Jiang, Wei Wei, Ting-Ting Yuan, Kui Zheng,Xiao-Ming Cui, Jie Li, Guang-Qian Pei, Xin Qiang, William Yiu-Man Cheung, Lian-Feng Li, Fang-Fang Sun, Si Qin,Ji-Cheng Huang, Gabriel M. Leung, *Edward C. Holmes*, Yan-Ling Hu, Yi Guan & Wu-Chun Cao. Identifying SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses in Malayan pangolins. _Nature_ 583, 282-285 (2020).doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2169-04. Fan Wu, Su Zhao, Bin Yu, Yan-Mei Chen, Wen Wang, Zhi-Gang Song, Yi Hu, Zhao-Wu Tao, Jun-Hua Tian,Yuan-Yuan Pei, Ming-Li Yuan, Yu-Ling Zhang, Fa-Hui Dai, Yi Liu, Qi-Min Wang, Jiao-Jiao Zheng, Lin Xu, *EdwardC. Holmes* and Yong-Zhen Zhang. A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease inChina. _Nature_ 579, 265-269 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2008-3We request all correspondence about the above projects, *with the exception of correspondence of peer-reviewers and editors of the above-named scientific journals*, held by The University of Sydney that reflect communications -to or from Professor Holmes - including written correspondence, emails, email attachments, CC and BCC.The time period covered by this request is from March 1, 2019 to December 2, 2020. Please narrow the search results to exclude any published papers, organizational newsletters or other widely available published materials."I know it is a very busy time for you as you return from your month of leave, but to help the University meet its tight legal obligations under the NSW GIPA Act, I would appreciate it very much if you could conduct comprehensivesearches for the requested information and provide any relevant correspondence to me by *Friday 22 January*. However, please do let me know if this timeframe will be problematic for you. Please note that under the GIPA Act, we are required to locate all relevant information and have this information provided to and assessed by the GIPA team. The GIPA team then assesses the information against the public interest test outlined in the GIPA Act, to determine whether some or all of the information should be released to theapplicant, or to determine whether some or all of the information should be withheld from the applicant. (Under theterminology in the Act, we assess whether the public interest considerations against disclosure outweigh the public interest considerations in favour of disclosure.)To help us make these decisions, we really welcome your advice. When you provide the information to us, you may want to draw attention to any considerations for or against disclosure which you think should be taken into account when the documents are examined by the GIPA team.If you have a large amount of information that is relevant to this request, please let me know as it may be easier for you to share this with us via a secure Cloudstor environment. Alternatively, if you don't have a significant amount ofrelevant correspondence, it may be easier for you to include the correspondence you identify as attachments to oneor more emails that you send back to me.I want to thank you again in advance for supporting the GIPA process at the University and for helping us with the tight legal obligations it places on us to locate and assess information in response to all requests. I know you have had an incredibly challenging year and I do apologise for the additional work we have imposed on you with its associated tight timeframes, but we are very grateful for your support.If there is anything we can do to assist your information searches, such as coordinating a Cyber Security search ofemail environments for specific keywords or search terms, please do let me know. And if you have any questions or concerns about the GIPA process or this application, please don't hesitate tocontact me at any time. Thanks so much and all the best,Kate