You don't know what you don't know: ethics and participant consent issues for eResearch users

You don't know what you don't know: ethics and participant consent issues for eResearch users

This paper shares the experiences of researchers and research support teams to enable eResearch that is ethically sound, particularly with regard to the consent of research participants. A key goal of eResearch is to use compute and data intensive infrastructure and collaborative approaches supported by advanced ICTs (HPC, Cloud Storage, Collaborative tools and High Speed networks) to enable data sharing and re-use. This paper shares the practical challenges and solutions from the perspectives of researchers and research support teams at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and poses questions and suggestions on ethics dilemmas such as ensuring that research participants have consented to share the data collected on them with other researchers. A collaborative and consultative approach involving teams in the USQ Office of Research, the USQ Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) Chair, the ICT Service Division and Library Services division resulted in successful outcomes for researchers.

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