FLICKR, BOB MICALEvery week, hundreds of papers that involve human participants in biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology research are published. And an increasing proportion of these appear in journals with open data policies. Such policies require researchers to make their complete data freely available. These requirements benefit scientific research: access to the complete raw data enables other researchers to replicate findings and leverage existing resources. But when research involves people, open data policies can bungle the participant consent process because there is no commonly used mechanism to balance participants’ confidentiality with the benefit to science.
Discussions about open data policies have thus far focused primarily on the needs and concerns of members of the scientific community. The discussion has yet to include the needs and concerns of participants whose data are being openly shared. And as more journals adopt open-data policies, researchers lose control of their participants’ data upon publication. It could be ethically problematic for research participants’ potentially sensitive information to be made freely available, not only to other researchers but also to third parties. Open data policies might, therefore, affect participants’ willingness to participate in research.
To test this notion, psychology researchers Jorden Cummings and Jessica Zagrodney from the University of Saskatchewan and medical systems engineer Eugene Day from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia designed an experiment in ...
