Towards Establishing ‘Best Practice’ for Handling Legal and
Ethical Concerns in eScience Projects
Marina Jirotka, Steve Harris, Sharon Lloyd, Rob Procter
While e-Science promises to radically transform science both in its execution and
results, full benefits will not be realised if it cannot overcome the legal, ethical and
societal challenges the transformation raises. These challenges are particularly acute in
the fields of e-health and related e-Biology, where all projects face generic challenges
including:
Privacy of information
Access to medical data
Use of medical data as test data
Securing ethical approval in a multi-site project
Designing technology to ‘fit’ organisational purposes
Ownership of data
This Birds of a Feather attempts to bring researchers from a range of backgrounds such
as, social and computer sciences, software engineering, engineering, philosophy of
science in order to establish issues of common concern in eHealth projects. The
discussion will focus on the ways in which a range of legal and ethical issues have been
handled in various projects to date and will attempt to outline possible strategies for
dealing with legal and ethical concern in the future.
Speakers include:
Dr Jonathan Berg
Dundee University
Problems Encountered by a Clinical Researcher
Dr Richard Ashcroft
Imperial College London
TBA
Dr Dipak Kalra
University College London
TBC
Dr Steve Harris
University of Oxford
Gaining ethical approval for your eHealth Project: experience from clinical trials
The short presentations are intended to stimulate discussion around issues of concern.
Technologies for eHealth hold great possibilities for improving practice in scientific and
healthcare domains, thus it is critical not to impede or slow down the development and
evaluation of such applications. To this end we wish to:
a) document the various types of ethical concerns that arise on eHealth projects
b) establish practical ways of addressing ethical challenges
c) move towards determining a ‘best practice’ for ethics on eHealth projects with
methods for disseminating such guidelines to the research and industrial
community