Using and sharing data legally and ethically securely
Questions about legal and ethical issues in connection with research data often arise throughout the entire research process. They arise during the planning, design and implementation of data collection, storage during and after the project, pseudonymisation or anonymisation, sharing and deletion of data.
Various departments at the university can help you with these questions
- Data Protection Service Centre: advises university projects on issues relating to personal data.
- Ethics Committee: Advice and assessment on ethical and legal aspects of research involving human subjects, research with personal data and safety-relevant cases in research projects at the University of Mannheim.
- Department I: Advice on and conclusion of cooperation agreements with non-university project partners in collaborative projects.
- UB: Consultation on and signing of licence/
data usage agreements, consultation on copyright (text and data mining).
General information
- Forschungsdaten.info website on the topic of “rights and obligations”: Overview of the most important legal topics in connection with research data.
- Expert opinion on the legal framework for research data management (321 KB, in German) from the DataJus project at TU Dresden (as of 2018)
Ownership of data, copyright & legal situation in the reuse of research data
- Rights to research data and databases from iRIGHTS.info (as of 2019).
- Copyright in science – An overview for research, teaching and libraries (1,833 KB, in German): Handout of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (as of 2020).
- Legally reusing research data (in German): Overview video from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg on the legal situation regarding the reuse of research data.
- Guidelines on text and data mining for research purposes in Germany by Elke Brehm (as of 2022).
- Information on text and data mining from forschungsdaten.info (as of 2022).
Data protection and consent
- Intranet page “Data protection in research – thought of everything?” (in German) of the Data Protection Service Centre of the University of Mannheim for university research projects.
- Infoserver of the Central Data Protection Office of the Universities of Baden-Württemberg (ZENDAS).
- Interactive virtual assistant – applicability of the DSGVO: the assistant helps to assess whether existing research data is personal data.
- Interactive Virtual Assistant – Consent: the assistant helps to assess whether effective consent has been given for the processing of existing personal research data.
- Ethics and Data Protection Decision Tree: an EU decision tree on ethics and data protection
- Data protection guidelines (as of 2020) of the German Data Forum (RatSWD)
- Information on “informed consent” from the German Network of Educational Research Data (Verbund FDB) including checklists and formulation examples (in German)
- Informed consent as a prerequisite for the (re-)use of research data (462 KB) by Katrin Schaar / RatSWD Working Paper (as of 2017)
- DARIAH ELDAH Consent Form Wizard of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) – Wizard for formulating a declaration of consent to the collection of personal data (as at: 2021)
Licences for publishing research data
- The Creative Commons Licence Chooser helps you to find the desired CC licence step by step (suitable for texts, images, data).
- Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL) (suitable for databases).
- Open Source Licence Chooser (for software) from GitHub.
Ethical aspects
- Handout on handling data in university research projects (98 KB) of the Ethics Committee of the University of Mannheim.
- Application form (checklist) of the Ethics Committee of the University of Mannheim (119 KB) for the documents to be submitted.
- Best practice research ethics – collection for researchers of the RatSWD.
- Teaching materials on research ethics in the social and economic sciences from the German Data Forum (RatSWD) (as of 2019, in German).
Generative AI
- Statement (pdf, 69 KB) of the Executive Committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the influence of generative models for text and image production on the sciences and the DFG's funding activities
- Guideline for the responsible use of generative AI in research, developed by the European Research Area Forum
