- Practical barriers, and suggestions to overcome them;
- 2. Relevant content on the rules and requirements of the main stakeholders providing research funding and grants;
- 3. Provisions and pitfalls for/in contract texts.
A selection of some of the barriers we encountered.
- A private company is willing to make a major investment in your research, but requires unlimited access to all research data in return. Some of the data is privacy sensitive. How to proceed?
- The case of mixed data: commercial data are collected and in the course of public funded research projects enriched. An impressive body of knowledge has been created. Is it allowed to ask a fee to third parties for access to the data bank?
- A researcher stored research data in Dropbox. The researcher passed away. How to gain access to the research data? Where to start? The research group. The relatives?
- Many people volunteer to be interviewed in your research. How to correctly protect their privacy? What if a researcher from another discipline asks permission to use the data for her research? Is this allowed or should the subjects be asked for specific consent?
- Researchers co-operate internationally and use their private email accounts (Gmail for instance) as well as their university email accounts to exchange information and data. How to keep track of the data? And of the versions? And whom it the data forwarded to?
Sharing data that is subject to informed consent and collected in a databank feeded with data from multiple parties. How to avoid cumbersome approval processes that involve many parties?
- The EU sets higher standards with regards to the ethics of data storage than we are currently used to in the Netherlands. By implication a university should have a data protection controller and is asked to anticipate future policies on privacy and data. How to deal with the situation where there is a gap between norms stated in the EU versus the Netherlands?