New and complex data sets raise challenging ethical questions about risk to individuals that are not sufficiently covered by computer science training, ethics codes, or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).
The use of publicly available, corporate, and government data sets in research projects may reveal human practices, behaviors, and interactions in unintended ways, creating the need for new kinds of ethical support.

Technical researchers using this data in their research are navigating issues and making ethical decisions in ways that are not often taught in their discipline. Many have only their peers to turn to for difficult questions that could have long-term impacts on their research or reputation. Research librarians are one set of actors within an ecosystem of support that university researchers rely on during their research. As providers of a growing set of Research Data Management (RDM) services, librarians help researchers meet federal mandates to produce Data Management Plans (DMPs) for their projects. In addition, the values of privacy, ethics, and equitable access to data are core to librarianship, making this partnership unique.

This project was initiated to surface complex issues faced by researchers and to explore current and potential interactivity between librarians and computer science researchers at different phases of the research process as they come across questions of privacy, potential harms, and security in data storage. We conducted interviews and campus visits with academic computer scientists and librarians to surface emerging ethical issues brought about by big data research, to examine the ecosystem of formal and informal support systems for researchers, and to consider the role of research librarians in assisting technical researchers as they navigate ethical issues.

This report provides valuable insights into the current state of collaboration between librarians and computer science researchers on issues of “big data” ethics. Statements and assertions represent information provided by participants, in combination with a literature review and additional formal and informal research. This report is not meant to be conclusive or comprehensive about all data science research, as we purposefully limited the scope of our work to a narrow band of institutions and actors. Yet, our findings do offer important insights that open up challenging questions and require future exploration.