Announcing new resources from the FORCE11-COPE Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group: flowcharts!

Recognizing the need for dialogue on best practices around ethical challenges in data publication, the FORCE11 Research Data Publication Ethics Working Group started in early 2021 as a multi-stakeholder community effort involving representatives of data repositories, journals, researchers, institutional research integrity officers and libraries. The group was set up in collaboration with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), to leverage COPE’s expertise in the development of guidelines and resources related to publication ethics for journal editors.

The Working Group developed recommendations for the handling of ethical concerns related to the publication of research data, which we shared in September 2021. The recommendations included consideration of the varied nature of concerns that may arise: Authorship and contribution conflicts, Legal and regulatory restrictions, Rigor or completeness of datasets, and potential Risks associated with the release of the data.

In addition to providing this overarching framework for the handling of ethical concerns, we also felt it was important to provide practical resources to support data publishers (data repositories, journals) in implementing the guidelines at their specific settings. We thus created policy templates that journals and data repositories could use to articulate their policies around the ethical aspects of data publication, and their alignment with the Working Group recommendations.

However, we recognized that an important aspect of normalizing best practices relates to the day-to-day handling of cases that the journals and data repositories may encounter, and that resources that would guide team members in this process would be particularly useful. With this goal, the Working Group set out to develop flowcharts for each of the four categories of issues outlined in the recommendations. Several group members worked collaboratively to produce flowcharts for each of the four categories outlined in the recommendations; for each of the categories, they created one flowchart for cases raised prior to the publication of the dataset, and another for the handling of issues involving published datasets. The group  iterated on the drafts while carefully considering the format that would best guide step-by-step follow up on individual cases, while maintaining the consistency in guidance across the four categories.

We are now pleased to share the eight finalized flowcharts to guide the handling of ethical concerns related to data publication.

With the release of these flowcharts, the Working Group is bringing its activities to a close. We hope that the recommendations and resources we have developed are valuable in the day-to-day work of those involved in data publishing. We also hope that they will stimulate additional community dialogue around practices and challenges related to responsible data publication. While the Working Group has closed its active work, we remain interested in community input on our outputs, and will review any feedback we receive. If you have any feedback for the Working Group or suggestions for further areas of need in this space, please reach out to Iratxe Puebla.

We thank all the members of the Working Group for their energy, their commitment and the many stimulating conversations over the last couple of years. This work would not have been possible without their dedication to open data and to research integrity, and we are grateful for their many contributions.

We are certain that data sharing and publication will continue to thrive in coming years and look forward to further conversations in the community toward practices, processes and tools that drive ethical data publishing.