DMPs ask researchers to spell out how existing research ethics guidelines, legal compliance issues and recommendations for sharing will apply to the data used in a research project. Questions include:
How will you manage any ethical issues?
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Guidance: departmental or institutional ethics committees; and formal consent agreements. Assess the need to remove location data for rare species, to protect participants, etc. You should show that you are aware of any issues and If doing research with Indigenous Peoples consult relevant Tri-Agency, C.A.R.E. and OCAP documents. |
How will you manage copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues?
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Guidance: For multi-partner projects, IPR ownership may be worth Consider any relevant funder, institutional, departmental Also consider permissions to reuse third-party data and |
Addressing the ethics and compliance questions in a DMP begins by ensuring you are familiar with any and all relevant policies, guidelines, contracts and laws such as:
In addition you will need to consider the nature of the research.
Taken together:
all contribute to whether you can share data and how.
In general, you can assume the following:
Not all data can or need to be open. Sometimes data is sensitive or proprietary and cannot be shared.
Sensitive data / proprietary data include:
Note: Researchers who undertake research in partnership with, or research about, the First Nations, Inuit or Métis Peoples of Canada should carefully read:
Resources for working with Sensitive Data
Further Reading:
Taken from:
McGill Libraries. Research Data Management. Ethics and Compliance. retrieved March 5th, 2021. https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/c.php?g=718144&p=5127408
If you can share data you will need to license it. For a general overview on copyright issues related to licensing see the Guide to Licensing Open Data from the Open Knowledge Foundation.
The following are typical Creative Commons license templates that are applied to data:
If you do not know which license to select, Creative Commons has a good tool to help.
Also be aware that if you have used data licensed under a Creative Commons License by another researcher, when you release that data as part of your research, you need to abide by the terms of the original license. As an example, it the original license was a Share-Alike license, you need to reshare that data under the same license.