Ethics, Information Security and Legal Considerations for Online Research

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Overview

What do researchers need to know to keep themselves, their participants and their university safe?

Speakers

• Jo Evershed:  CEO Gorilla Experiment Builder – Over the last few years, we’ve helped thousands of researchers take their studies online with Gorilla.  Through doing this we’ve spoken to a large number of universities, IT specialists, lawyers and researchers about the legal, technical and ethical requirements when taking research online.  In this talk, I’ll share with you the main features to look for when evaluating a service provider, so that you can be confident you’re online research is safe, secure and compliant.
• Justin Fidler:  CEO SONA Systems – Taking psychology research online can be daunting.  There are a myriad of rules, regulations and best practices for universities and researchers to comply with.  On the legal side GDPR and Accessibility are obvious ones.  From an ethical viewpoint there’s participant consent, anonymity and withdrawal.  And on the technical side you’ll want to consider data security and data redundancy.  To manage this complexity and safeguard grant money, universities often have stringent requirements to ensure they meet all necessary requirements.  In this talk, I’ll describe the main issues that face researchers taking studies online, how these are mitigated.
• Nicolas Gold:  Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science UCL – Undertaking research using online data sources raises a range of complex research ethics issues.  These arise from the environment (with platforms constraining data access and use, plus aspects of copyright and data protection law), from the data itself (including issues of scale, impact, and blurring of the primary/secondary data boundary), and the expectations and rights of ‘participants’ (including differing views on public and private data, consent, and the use and persistence of data outside of participants’ expectations).  In this talk I will describe these issues in the context of research ethics evaluation, discussing how ethical tensions may be addressed, and drawing on examples from social media and software repository mining.