Data Management and Publishing

Ethical and Legal Issues

When publishing data, it is vital to consider the rights and responsibilities you have with regard to issues of confidentiality and intellectual property.

Confidentiality

It is vital to maintain the confidentiality of research subjects for reasons of ethics and to ensure the continuing participation in research.

• Evaluate the sensitivity of your data: Researchers should consider whether or not their data contains either direct or indirect identifiers that could be utilized with other public information to identify research participants.
• Obtain a confidentiality review: A benefit to depositing your data with ICPSR is that their staff will review your data for the presence of confidential information.
• Comply with MIT regulations: MIT researchers concerned about confidentiality issues with their data should consult the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES).
• Comply with regulations for health research: HIPPA Privacy Rule, Information for Researchers.
• Enable restricted use of your data: Do you want to make your data available in a more restricted, limited-access manner? The ICPSR DSDR program has resources for data producers, including a tool for Designing a Restricted Data Use Contract.
• Learn about guidelines from the National Academy of Engineering: Their Online Ethics Center includes a discussion of  Ethical Issues in Data Management.

Intellectual Property

Most data is not copyrightable in the U.S. and licenses usually do not apply and are not enforceable. However, publishers of data may want to make sure that they have the rights to do so.  Particularly if you’ve gathered the data from multiple sources, you may need to obtain other researchers’ permission to publish data that they collected.  MIT Researchers can consult the Office of General Counsel with questions regarding intellectual property rights and your data.

For a general discussion about publishing your data, applicable to many disciplines, see the ICPSR Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving (pdf).

This page was last updated on Thursday, 16-Jul-2009 08:02:27 EDT