New to the SCN: Learning Data Ethics for Open Data Sharing

This is the latest post in a series announcing resources created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholcomm topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019, permitting us to pay creators for their labor while building a solid initial collection. These works are the result of one of three calls for proposals (our first CFP was issued in fall 2020; the second in late spring ‘21, and the third in late fall 2021).

Today we’re excited to share “Learning Data Ethics for Open Data Sharing” (available via Scalar, OSF, and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Lynnee Argabright, Research Data Librarian at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Lynnee argues that “Responsible data sharing is vital to building a positive academic and public community around the availability of shared data.” Through this open resource, she provides a great vehicle for LIS students, librarians, and researchers to learn more about ethical data sharing. Here’s Lynnee to introduce Learning Data Ethics for Open Data Sharing:

I entered my first academic librarian job after library school in a newly created data librarian role. I’d gotten some scholarly communications training during school about teaching the benefits of open access, about how to do basic data research methods, and about how to deposit content into open repositories. Being a “data expert” on behalf of a whole campus, however, was new, and meant I spent a lot of time on professional development and researching to prepare before consultations in order to apply open science concepts to data. As a special focus for my campus, I realized there was little to no informed leadership about data privacy for research data. So I joined the IRB (Institutional Review Board) Full Review Board as an ex-officio member and targeted a lot of my own training on data ethics.

Finding data ethics professional development opportunities has felt like a treasure hunt and now I’m a dragon sitting on an expanding ethics lair. For example, I enrolled in an National Libraries of Medicine data ethics course, berry-picked attending singular data DEIA (Diversity Equity Inclusion Accessibility) sessions from various library subject-specific conferences, found social justice data and text analysis webinars held virtually at other universities during Love Data Week, attended numerous redundant data management webinars from peer institutions to see how they brought up data storage, watched out for new Journal of e-Science Librarianship articles to see how sensitive data was included in data librarian services research, and scrolled through my Twitter news feed for interesting data toolkits… Wouldn’t it be nice to share some of this knowledge bounty?

I also noticed that the few faculty at my campus who were already sharing their data were non-human subjects researchers with zero documentation associated with their datasets; and that human subjects faculty would unanimously state in their IRB applications they would not share data outside their collaborators and would destroy it upon completion of their study. To advocate for open access, while knowing grant funders and journals are developing open data sharing policies, I wanted to start building up awareness about what is involved with open data sharing and that a data repository record can be controlled or restricted depending on the confidentiality needs for the data. I started thinking about how to make this process a little bit easier and more transparent. That meant curation checklists to help target and process red flag sensitive data curation. Template language to set up data sharing intentions from the beginning. De-identification strategies to streamline practice. Sustainability considerations to keep in mind as a solo data librarian or solo data researcher.

The resulting Open Educational Resource uses the open source Scalar platform to allow users to explore and connect between the concepts of data ethics and data sharing and some practical curation methods and workflows to use with these in mind. It offers activities to practice engaging in data ethics, data sharing, and data curation, to help realize what issues come up and experience what it’s like to curate data. It provides initial overviews of these topics–such as FAIR, CARE, and CURATED–with links to further resources. Because of its coverage of data ethics specifically as it relates to the process of research data sharing, it is not a comprehensive course on data ethics at large–which needs to be considered in all parts of the data lifecycle areas; however, I hope it will be a beneficial course for building confidence and context towards guiding or developing responsible open human subjects research data.

About the Author

Lynnee Argabright is the Research Data Librarian at University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNCW). She provides guidance about collecting, using, managing, and sharing data in research, through instructional workshops or individual consultations. Since joining UNCW in August 2021, she has initiated and been involved in several programs, including facilitating Love Data Week, reviewing Data Management Plans, instructing about Responsible Conduct of Research, developing guidelines for secure data access and use, and is an ex-officio member of the university’s IRB Full Review Board.