Seminar 2021: Ethical practice in research data publication - challenges, lessons and opportunities

This seminar session featured four members of the research publishing community discussing their experiences and perspectives on current workflows, standards and ethical issues around dataset curation, management and publication. This session is one of nine webinars forming the COPE Seminar 2021.

Over the past decade, we have seen a marked increase in the publication of research data, driven by journal, funder, and institutional policies. This has brought ethical challenges specific to datasets, which can affect the journal publication related to the dataset. To respond to these emerging challenges, the FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group, in collaboration with COPE, is developing guidelines and resources to support journal editors, data repositories, and institutions in the handling of ethics cases related to research data.

Introduction

Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director for ASAPbio moderated this seminar, prefacing the discussions on the increasingly widespread adoption of data publication with reference to the FAIR Guiding Principles of Data Management and Stewardship, which aim to ensure materials are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Iratxe highlighted key themes in the drive towards research data sharing through funding mandates and journals own initiatives, supported by data availability statements, and recommendations from organisations such as ICMJE, which request data sharing plans be included in clinical trial registrations.

She highlighted COPE’s contributions to a number of initiatives; including development of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines, funding research into data sharing policies, hosting a number of webinars, and in February 2021, the launch of the FORCE11 research data publishing ethics working group “to develop industry-leading guidance and recommended best practices to support the different stakeholders in handling the ethical responsibilities associated with publishing research data”. She detailed the set of recommendations from the working group, across four broad categories; Authorship, Legal and regulatory restrictions, Rigor and Risk.

Ethical practice in research data publication, COPE Seminar 2021

Presentation

Ethical practice in research data publication, COPE Seminar 2021 PDF 2 MB

Three perspectives

Data repository

Daniella Lowenberg Product Manager for Dryad discussed Dryad’s dataset management policies, and the difference between peer reviewing content and curation. She spoke about her experience in working on understanding the role of a repository in dealing with issues of anonymity, offensive material including abuse and conspiracy theories, and standards around retractions, corrections and amendments to errorful, incomplete and inaccurate data.

Research institution

Joerg Heber Research Integrity Officer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spoke from an institutional perspective, detailing universities roles in providing continuous education around research integrity and data sharing, and being a point of contact for dealing with issues and problems. He also spoke about the capacity of institutions to manage datasets, and the consistency, standardisation and quality of workflows, and queried whether institutional policies adequately cover the range of scenarios around dataset management which Daniella mentioned in her comments.

Data journal editor

Scott Edmunds (ORCID:0000-0001-6444-1436) Editor-in-Chief of GigaScience spoke of his experiences in Hong Kong, as EiC of a data journal and data repository, describing similarities and differences in handling publication issues, such as cases where distorted, flawed data can still provide useful interpretations if the context and limitations are acknowledged and incorporated into the analysis, and where legal issues do not equate to ethical issues, but need to be dealt with in a different way, bringing their own complications to the research publishing process.

Questions and answers

A Q&A session followed the presentations, bringing up several issues, including handling ambiguity between data and articles, where most repositories do not know the manuscripts which relate to the deposited datasets; guidance on writing management and policy plans; application of journal standards to data hosting; creating COPE resources, outreach and education, and several other topics on which the speakers provided thoughtful insight.