Ethical provisions for "opening" naturally occurring data

In order to be able to share or reuse naturally occurring data, researchers need to obtain informed consent from their participants. This requires participants to be fully briefed about how their data will be collected, stored, managed, and made available to other researchers and for other projects. 

 

On this page we provide annotated samples of an informed consent form and a participant information sheet in which the above issues are addressed. We hope these samples will be of help to researchers working with naturally occurring data by serving as a starting point and source of information for drawing up consent forms and participant information sheets. Note that these samples are not supposed to be used as templates, which are usually provided by ethics committee. We encourage everyone to get thoroughly familiar with the ethics policies and guidelines in your own institutions and seek advice from ethics committee staff if necessary.