Oxford eSocial Science Project: ethical, legal and institutional dynamics of grid enabled eSciences

The design and use of advanced Internet and Grid technologies in the social, natural and computer sciences are likely to reconfigure not only how researchers obtain and provide data resources and other information but also what they and the public can access and know; not only how they collaborate, but with whom they collaborate; not only what computer-based services they use, but from whom they obtain services. This reconfiguring affects the provision of data resources in ways that raise legal, institutional and social issues such as confidentiality, privacy and data protection, ownership of intellectual property rights, anonymity and accountability, and issues of trust, confidence, and risk in distributed collaboration. This project focuses on understanding these issues in order to give the UK research community a lead in advancing understanding of the social shaping and impacts of e-infrastructures and in identifying ways forward for the appropriate design of e-science technologies, institutions and practices. A multidisciplinary team of social scientists, legal scholars and computer scientists will select, direct and analyse a set of in-depth comparative case studies of e-social science and e-science projects.

This work is supported by ESRC grant RES-149-25-1022. It is a partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute.