Ethical issues of e-research from a health perspective

by DAMES e-Health group: Nadine Dougall, Alison Dawson, Margaret Maxwell, Paul Lambert, Clare Leadbetter, Susan McCafferty, Patrick Clark, and Richard Sinnott

The growing potential of health informatics and the use of linked datasets offer opportunities for a new wave of health research which can track large numbers of individuals or populations across different datasets. However, such study designs exhibit substantial differences from the models of clinical trials which have informed previous narratives on research ethics. The [...]

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Inventing enlightened ways of relating to e-environments

by Ekaterina de Vries

Written by
Ekaterina de Vries, edevries@vub.ac.be
PhD at the Center for Law, Science, Technology & Society Studies (LSTS)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 /1050 Brussel
Belgium

To invent enlightened ways of relating to e-environments may mean playing on their actual affordances and constraints[1].
Relating to the new
The last decades a wide variety of e-environments (online and off line data [...]

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Ethical issues in digital data archiving and sharing

by Natasha Mauthner and Odette Parry

The development of a manifesto on ethics of e-research assumes that e-research differs from other research approaches, therefore requiring its own set of ethical guidelines. In considering the distinctiveness of e-research, it is helpful to differentiate between e-research as tool or method and e-research as site or ‘field’. Our own discussion focuses on e-research as [...]

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Automation

by David De Roure

In the early days of e-Research there was much talk of the data deluge (from new scientific instruments, sensor networks, online transactions…) and how researchers couldn’t cope: manual triaging of available data into manageable chunks would lead to failure to discover results and an inability to see patterns in the overall picture.
The ‘obvious’ answer was [...]

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Agile Ethics

by Webmoor

I advocate an agile research principle for working in the digital social sciences. This is a mode of engagement, a sensibility for good practice, more than a formal list of procedures or protocols. An agile research approach emerged as an attitude within design driven software development. It is form fit for the broad programme of [...]

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Internet research ethics: revisiting the relations between technologies, spaces, texts and people

by Kate ORiordan

Challenges in internet research are part of a broader landscape of change in the production, dissemination and status of knowledge. Such shifts include the blurring of producer and consumer, the moving perimeters of private and public, and the changing forms and value of information and knowledge. In this sense issues in internet research ethics also [...]

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Computation, digitisation and the source of social values

by Annamaria Carusi

When the word ‘ethics’ is used in an e-research context, very often it is closely followed by the word ‘regulation’. This is understandable, since many of the capabilities of e-research technologies leave us perplexed as to whether to go on applying existing regulations or whether to make a change, and if so, which changes. But [...]

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Key ethical concerns that should travel between e-social and e-natural science

by Sabina Leonelli

by Sabina Leonelli
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis)
University of Exeter
Web interactions and ICTs enable the production and dissemination of huge masses of data of different types. On the one hand, this leads to the proliferation of new data types, which were not available to social scientists before the advent of Internet and information technology. [...]

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Researching the public web

by Michael Thelwall

by Mike Thelwall,
Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group,
University of Wolverhampton, UK.
I would like to make the case that academic researchers should not have any restrictions placed on the kinds of (legal) data that they investigate on the public web. In particular, researchers should be allowed to investigate personal information in the public web, such as social network [...]

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