ABSTRACT
In many contexts, ethical, legal and social issues have been discursively constructed as a barrier or challenge to providing open access to data, especially data that raises intellectual property or privacy and data protection issues. However, others have argued that providing open access to data, especially data resulting from publicly-funded research, is also an ethical imperative. Specifically, it has the potential to ‘level the playing field in terms of who has access to information and knowledge’ (Sveinsdottir et al. 2013, p. 36), ‘increase public trust and stimulate business activity’ (The Royal Society 2012, p. 7), and ‘increase public understanding of science, inspire the young, result in better quality decision making in government and commerce, and bring other benefits’ (Dallmeier-Tiessen et al. 2012, p. 16). Consequently, alongside the need to meet legal obligations and ethical standards around research and data collection, academic researchers are also being strongly encouraged to enable a realisation of the knowledge society, either through opening up as much data as possible, or by exploiting their data to enable innovation.
