Page 7 - RESEARCH ETHICSZINE-G8
P. 7
CASE STUDY I – DATA SHARING PROBLEM
Dr. Wexford, one of principal investigators of epidemiological study on the health of 10,000
agricultural workers. She has a lot of impressive dataset that includes information on demographics,
environmental exposures, genetics, and various disease outcomes such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease (PD),
and ALS. Recently, she has just published a paper on the relationship between pesticide exposure and
Parkinson diseases in a journal. After that, she is planning to publish many other journals from her dataset.
When she completes a few of published paper, she receives a request from another research team for
access to her complete dataset about the relationship between pesticide exposures and skin cancer. Dr.
Wexford was planning to conduct a research on that topic also.
At the same time, the ethical norm of openness obliges her to share a complete data with the other
research team. Her research funding agency also have rules that constrain her to share data with another
research team. If she shares the data with the other team, they may publish a paper that she was planning
to publish, thus depriving her of recognition and priority. Dr. Wexford needs to take some time to plan
about what she should do to overcome this problem.
