The Ethics of Data: Critically Thinking About Open Data, 6th February
Title of Session
The Ethics of Data: Critically Thinking About Open Data
Tutor Name
Dr Louise Bezuidenhout
Tutor Biography
Louise Bezuidenhout is a senior researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a UNESCO co-chair on Inclusion and Diversity in Global Science. She was previously a tutor in the Graduate School at the Department for Continuing Education in Oxford and a postdoctoral fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. She is a social science researcher who specializes in issues relating to Open Science, data sharing and access. https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/louise-bezuidenhout#tab-1
Session Synopsis
This session will help students to understand how the Open Science movement focuses research practices on global collective benefit. Focusing on Open Data, the session will provide students with an opportunity to discuss the ethical strengths and challenges of making research data open.
Summary
The Open Science movement is increasingly shaping how we understand impactful research. The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science foregrounds values needed to ensure that research serves the global good: quality and integrity, collective benefit, equity and fairness, diversity and inclusiveness. Within the suite of Open Science activities Open Data is key, and researchers are increasingly expected to make the data arising from their research FAIR and as open as possible.
Despite the increasing prominence of Open Data, many researchers continue to struggle to implement open data management practices in their research. These struggles tend to coalesce around ethical concerns relating to data release and reuse. These concerns are exacerbated by a common misapprehension that data can either be open or closed, which overlooks the diversity of practices available for researchers to adopt to ensure that their research data holds future value.
In this session we will discuss some of the challenges of working as an open researcher. Going beyond issues such as dealing with sensitive data, we will discuss issues such as data quality, environmental impact, and the global inclusiveness of data infrastructures. These discussions will demonstrate to participants how to critically engage with their data storage and release decisions and how to make informed choices in their data management planning.
Key Learning Outcomes
Following the session, students should:
1. Understand the Open Data movement and the phrase “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”
2. Appreciate some of the wide-ranging ethical issues that currently shape discussions about Open Data
3. Understand the responsibility of researchers in supporting data release and reuse
Suggested readings
An introduction to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2022) https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000383771