Ethical Issues in a Research Infrastructure for Empirical Social Sciences

Based on a scoping literature review that aimed to identify critical ethical issues, existing mitigating practices, research gaps and implications for the creation and management of a Research Infrastructure for empirical social sciences, this chapter addresses the ethical aspects of open social science research and discusses measures for guidelines that can ensure responsible open science. It also includes ethical considerations and recommendations for the management of the risks connected to the possibility of indirect identification of research participants in open data. The review was conducted as part of the activities of the Work Package 2 of the PNNR funded project FOSSR - Fostering Open Science in Social Science Research (Activity 2.5 “FOSSR Ethical Issues”). The analysis identified three recurring and interconnected issues: i) although the social sciences use a wide variety of data, and different disciplines within the social sciences therefore face different issues regarding the ethics and integrity of data, there is still little clarity on the concrete meaning of “open data” and “FAIR principles” for the social sciences; ii) the variety and specificity of these data is not recognized, and they are often treated as if they were quantitative data; and iii) given their specificity, for these kinds of data it is more complex to balance ethical principles (e.g., protecting research participants) with scientific needs (e.g., ensuring that data are reusable).