Question

Dr. Smith is the principal investigator of a large, epidemiological study on the health of 10,000 agricultural workers. She has an impressive dataset that includes information on demographics, environmental exposures, diet, genetics, and various disease outcomes such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease (PD), and ALS. She has just published a paper on the relationship between pesticide exposure and PD in a prestigious journal. She is planning to publish many other papers from her dataset. She receives a request from another research team that wants access to her complete dataset. They are interested in examining the relationship between pesticide exposures and skin cancer. Dr. Smith was planning to conduct a study on this topic.

Dr. Smith faces a difficult choice. On the one hand, the ethical norm of openness obliges her to share data with the other research team. Her funding agency may also have rules that obligate her to share data. On the other hand, if she shares data with the other team, they may publish results that she was planning to publish, thus depriving her (and her team) of recognition and priority.

It seems that there are good arguments on both sides of this issue and Dr. Smith needs your help in deciding what to do. How do you suggest Dr. Smith handle this tricky ethical question?

Answer 1

Dr. Smith was facing a very difficult situation. On one side the funding agency forcing her to share data. On the other side, she needs to recognize her name through this research topic. Besides her name, she has to think more of good research outcome by the other team with the help of her data. It is important to consider the right and wrong values during an ethical dilemma. Hesitate to share data leads to ethical misconduct. So She can consult with her senior researchers to take different options. One option that satisfies both her and the other team is to share data with an agreement. In an agreement, she can limit the uses of data, decide of publications, and authorship which satisfies both of them.