Reusing data: Technical and ethical challenges

Abstract

Research centres, universities and public organisations create datasets that can be reused in research. Reusing data makes it possible to reproduce studies, generate new research questions and new knowledge, but it also gives rise to technical and ethical challenges. Part of these issues are repositories interoperability to accomplish FAIR principles or issues related to data privacy or anonymity. At the same time, funding institutions require that data management plans be submitted for grants, and research tends to be increasingly interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity may entail barriers for researchers to reuse data, such as a lack of skills to manipulate data, given that each discipline generates different types of data in different technical formats, often non-standardized. Additionally, the use of standards to validate data reuse and better metadata to find appropriate datasets seem necessary. This paper offers a review of the literature that addresses data reuse in terms of technical, ethical-related issues.