Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Professor Madeleine Murtagh, Dr Joel MinionORCiD, Emeritus Professor Paul BurtonORCiD
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
© Copyright 2016, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.The social structures that govern data/sample release aim to safeguard the confidentiality and privacy of cohort research participants (without whom there would be no data or samples) and enable the realization of societal benefit through optimizing the scientific use of those cohorts. Within collaborations involving multiple cohorts and biobanks, however, the local, national, and supranational institutional and legal guidelines for research (which produce a multiplicity of data access governance structures and guidelines) risk impeding the very science that is the raison d'etre of these consortia. We present an ethnographic study, which examined the epistemic and nonepistemic values driving decisions about data access and their consequences in the context of the pilot of an integrated approach to co-analysis of data. We demonstrate how the potential analytic flexibility offered by this approach was lost under contemporary data access governance. We identify three dominant values: protecting the research participant, protecting the study, and protecting the researcher. These values were both supported by and juxtaposed against a "public good" argument, and each was used as a rationale to both promote and inhibit sharing of data. While protection of the research participants was central to access permissions, decisions were also attentive to the desire of researchers to see their efforts in building population biobanks and cohorts realized in the form of scientific outputs. We conclude that systems for governing and enabling data access in large consortia need to (1) protect disclosure of research participant information or identity, (2) ensure the specific expectations of research participants are met, (3) embody systems of review that are transparent and not compromised by the specific interests of one particular group of stakeholders, and (4) facilitate data access procedures that are timely and efficient. Practical solutions are urgently needed. New approaches to data access governance should be trialed (and formally evaluated) with input from and discussion with stakeholders.
Author(s): Murtagh MJ, Turner A, Minion JT, Fay M, Burton PR
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Biopreservation and Biobanking
Year: 2016
Volume: 14
Issue: 3
Pages: 231-240
Print publication date: 01/06/2016
Online publication date: 20/05/2016
Acceptance date: 02/06/2014
ISSN (print): 1947-5535
ISSN (electronic): 1947-5543
Publisher: Mary Ann Liebert Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1089/bio.2016.0002
DOI: 10.1089/bio.2016.0002
PubMed id: 27200470
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
