By Nancy Kass

(Part of CAOS: Critical Assessment of Open Science: A Series of Posts Featuring Voices from the Open Science Movement)

 Ethics is an essential consideration for any research initiative that collects, uses, or reuses human data or samples. In data activities of these types, ethics concerns — whether raised by institutional review boards (IRBs) tasked with reviewing projects, or in the published literature — seem to focus almost entirely on questions of adequate privacy practices and security protections. Questions are raised about what fields are kept, what permissions have been provided for future access, and whether potential participants have adequately understood relevant parameters.

And yet considerations of ethics go beyond who gives permission for or has access to individuals’ data. Open science promises considerable ethical good: speeding up medical discovery, avoiding unnecessary duplication, creating efficiencies, and encouraging more democratic science. These are unquestionably ethical goods. But leaving discussions of ethics and open science simply to the good that can come and the need for privacy protections is concerningly narrow.

Open-science projects should also actively evaluate how the potential benefit of helping others actually will be realized, and what they can build into their structures to increase the chance that this will occur. Will open science simply allow users to do what they want with data as long as those whose data are included have been informed that the data will be widely shared? Or will the ethics of open-science support work to help ensure that goals, such as benefit and fairness, are more likely to be realized?

…continue reading ‘On the Ethics of Open Science’

Read more posts in the CAOS series

Image via Medium – Photo by Bit Cloud on Unsplash

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