A proper approach to ethical and legal issues allows for easy and effective handling of data in the future - ensuring compliance with ethical and legal conditions is therefore the basic assumption of the work of a modern researcher.
Research data to be reused may come from previous own projects or those of colleagues from the same unit, or from open repositories, collections of researchers from another unit, websites or special closed collections, e.g. museums or libraries. Research data reuse is defined as searching, processing, and analyzing existing data sets to create new knowledge. Data reuse involves two completely different activities: data sharing and data publishing.
There are several ethical issues regarding data reuse that should be considered during the planning stage of a research project. These include:
- correct data licensing,
- level of reliability of data and their origin,
- anonymity, privacy and confidentiality of data,
- attribution when reusing other people's data.
In the case of scientific research involving humans, an ethical and legal issue of particular importance is obtaining informed consent, taking into account both the purpose and method of future use of the data, as well as covering issues of anonymity, privacy and data confidentiality.
