Ethical and Legal Issues

For more information, view the CUREC (Central University Research Ethics Committee) pages for information on the University's policy and guidance on the ethical review of research projects involving human participants.
Personal data or sensitive data may not be suitable for sharing with other researchers, depending on whether informed consent has been obtained from participants. You may wish to consider anonymisation techniques or data aggregation for numeric data, editing of video or sound recordings, use of pseudonyms in qualitative data etc. The UK Data Archive has a comprehensive guide on consent, confidentiality and ethics - see http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/consent-ethics

Data which include multiple copyright layers or rights owners cannot be shared unless permission for data sharing has been given by all copyright/rights holders.
Further information about IP in the context of agreements that may be made by, or be of relevance to, the University, is available: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/researchsupport/ip/commonterms/ or contact the IP team within Research Services.

Is your data potentially commercially exploitable? There may be restrictions or delays on data sharing needed to protect the IP, copyright or patentable data. View the Intellectual Property pages, or contact Isis Innovation for advice. Isis helps Oxford University researchers to commercialise intellectual property arising from their research: patenting, licensing, spin-out companies.

The 1998 Data Protection Act affects the processing of personal or sensitive data and the circumstances under which you can share it with others.You can view the University's policy on Data Protection at:http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/dataprotection/.
Additionally, Legal Services has produced Guidance on Data Protection and Research (95kb) which aims to introduce researchers to the provisions of the Data Protection Act and assist with their preparation for research projects.

There may be Freedom of Information issues or requests for data - visit the University of Oxford's FOI pages.

The Research Skills Toolkit (SSO login needed) offers a section on Research Ethics, including Data Ethics.
Data Protection, Rights and Access is an interactive online training module from the MANTRA Project.
The Digital Curation Centre offers a guide to How to License Research Data.
The University of Cambridge’s research data management Web pages offer sections on Intellectual Property Rights, Data Protection and Ethics, and Freedom of Information Requests.
The PrePARe Project offers a useful IPR Checklist.
Managing Sensitive Research Data and Intellectual Property Rights and Research Data are slidecasts from the University of Cambridge. Cambridge also offers a number of short video interviews on related topics.

Subject-specific guidance

Social Sciences: The UK Data Archive provides advice pages on Consent and Ethics and Copyright, aimed at researchers working in the social sciences and some humanities disciplines. Teaching materials for a classroom-based course are also available.
Archaeology: The Archaeology Data Service’s Guides to Good Practice include a section on Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights.
Archaeology: Module 4 of the DataTrain Archaeology teaching materials covers rights and digital data.
Health-Related Disciplines: Confidentiality and data protection are among the topics covered in Session 3 of the DATUM for Health teaching materials.
Medical Research: The MRC’s Good Research Practice: Principles and Guidelines includes sections covering data management issues. Use of Personal Data in Research is among the topics addressed in the NHS’s National Research Ethics Services’ Guidance pages.

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