Ethics of Open Data

Abstract: This chapter addresses emergent ethical issues in producing, using, curating, and providing services for open data. Our goal is to provide an introduction to how ethical topics in open data manifest in practical dilemmas for scholarly communications and some approaches to understanding and working through them. We begin with a brief overview of what can be thought of as three basic theories of ethics that intersect with dilemmas in openness, accountability, transparency, and fairness in data: Virtue, Consequential, and Non-consequential ethics. We then map these kinds of ethics to the practical questions that arise in provisioning infrastructures, providing services, and supporting sustainable research in science and scholarship that depends upon open access to data. Throughout, we attempt to offer concrete examples of potential ethical dilemmas facing scholarly communication with respect to open data, and try to make clear what kinds of ethical positions are helpful to practitioners. In doing so, we hope to both clarify the ethical questions facing librarians doing practical work to support open data access, as well as situate current debates in the field with respect to these three kinds of ethics.