What is informed consent?

Informed consent is an ethical requirement for most research and must be considered and implemented throughout the research lifecycle, from planning to publication to sharing. Informed consent, whether in written or oral form, is needed for depositing datasets at Discuss Data. Missing informed consent may restrict the opportunities for data usage, publishing and sharing. If during the fieldwork consent forms were presented and informants chose not to give consent for the archiving and re-use of qualitative data, then the data cannot be published with Discuss Data.

DARIAH-EU provides a free Consent Form Wizard, a tool which guides you through a questionnaire that will consequently generate a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant form for obtaining consent from data subjects, tailored to your specific purpose and the data categories you intend to collect.

An example consent form, developed by the UK Data Service and fully in line with the GDPR, can be found here.

Important note: If you don't have consent to publish the data, it is still possible to publish your data collection as "metadata only" - without the dataset itself. In this case, the metadata and the description of data collection will be published, but not the data files. Still, this would make it possible to find, discuss and cite your dataset with a DOI.