Open with care: transparency and data sharing in civically engaged research

Paper by Ankushi Mitra: “Research transparency and data access are considered increasingly important for advancing research credibility, cumulative learning, and discovery. However, debates persist about how to define and achieve these goals across diverse forms of inquiry. This article intervenes in these debates, arguing that the participants and communities with whom scholars work are active stakeholders in science, and thus have a range of rights, interests, and researcher obligations to them in the practice of transparency and openness. Drawing on civically engaged research and related approaches that advocate for subjects of inquiry to more actively shape its process and share in its benefits, I outline a broader vision of research openness not only as a matter of peer scrutiny among scholars or a top-down exercise in compliance, but rather as a space for engaging and maximizing opportunities for all stakeholders in research. Accordingly, this article provides an ethical and practical framework for broadening transparency, accessibility, and data-sharing and benefit-sharing in research. It promotes movement beyond open science to a more inclusive and socially responsive science anchored in a larger ethical commitment: that the pursuit of knowledge be accountable and its benefits made accessible to the citizens and communities who make it possible…(More)”.