This is not an Anniversary!

This volume of the BMS is number 150. When we took over as editors of the journal, over three years ago now, we had considered preparing an anniversary issue for this occasion. The editorial board discussed several projects before eventually deciding not to have too many commemorations. When the BMS’s founding team had passed on the baton, we had already published two prefaces – one by Karl van Meter and the other by Marie-Ange Schiltz – discussing the journal’s history. They can be found in issue number 137–138.

Fourteen issues later, we are offering our readers a volume devoted to the ethical questions posed by the archiving and sharing of data. And there is something pleasing to us about number 150 being a guest edited issue, because calling on guest editors and publishing thematic issues were among the goals we set ourselves in 2018. This is the third that we have published, after number 143 on CAQDAS software (edited by Thibaut Rioufreyt), 145 on children (edited by Julie Pagis and Alice Simon) and of course the recent double issue 147–148 devoted to articles (co-)authored by researchers on precarious job contracts. We would like to take the opportunity of this editorial to renew our call for more colleagues to think about becoming guest editors: please do not hesitate to send us your proposals.

This issue number 150 was prepared by Pablo Diaz and it extends current international discussions about the open access to data enabled by the digital revolution. The principle according to which research data must be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) has become widely established at all levels of research governance, especially in Europe. However, this also raises ethical questions, which emerge with all the more salience when we move from the theory to the practice of making data accessible and sharing them, as illustrated by the articles in this special issue. These ethical questions relate, first and foremost, to protecting study participants: the family and friends of people who have died by suicide in Quebec and whose legal documents are being archived by Patrick Corriveau’s team; the refugees in the United Kingdom whom Emma Stewart and Marnie Schaffer are studying and whose data they are trying to make accessible, to comply with the directives of their funding body; the Front National activists mentioned in Daniel Bizeul’s field notes, which he wanted to make available on the French databank Bequali. In each case, the authors underline how, in order to respect study participants and their families, they had to take precautions which all limited how the data could be reused. In so doing, they offer an illustration of the expression now included in official recommendations, especially in France, about open science: data must be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. ¹

The need to keep data closed to some extent, especially in the social sciences, is not just an ethical issue – it is also a legal one. Since the General Data Protection Regulation was adopted in spring 2019, researchers in European Union countries must respect study participants’ rights to information, but also to modify or withdraw the data that concerns them. Given how much work is involved in designing and implementing a mechanism for creating data, researchers understandably tend to consider that the material they collate belongs to them. The GDPR, however, makes it unequivocally clear that this is not the case and that for so long as these data make the study participants identifiable, they are – and remain – their property. As such, the participants must therefore be informed about what researchers intend to do with the data, why, and how, so that they can change or withdraw them as they see fit. The GDPR changes things. We published an initial article on this topic last year (Marie Plessz, number 145) asking for reactions and other texts offering accounts of, or questions about, how we are all adapting to this new legal framework. In order to stimulate this debate, in this issue Sophie Duchesne and Maylis Ferry put forward some reflections on how the GDPR had a greater influence than they had imagined on their research on banal nationalism in the family context. The aims of their article are twofold: pedagogical, in terms of the regulation itself, but also provocative, in terms of describing the effects of these new measures on research practices, with the hope of inspiring further, perhaps more critical, accounts than those we have published so far.

This issue concludes, as every year, with the Spring Newsletter of the RC33, the BMS’s constant travelling companion. Our thanks, once again, to Karl van Meter for having written it; and thanks too to Marie-Ange Résano for helping us to format this issue’s texts.