The Ethics of Scholarly Research and the Internet: Issues of Publication, Privacy, and the Right to Speak

Abstract

IntroductionThe following article considers the ethical implications of two basic issues that scholarly researchers face when using Internet sources-publication and privacy and who has the right to speak. The conventions, rules, and ethics in these areas were relatively clear when print publications dominated the process of scholarly communication, but the different nature of Internet resources has made it necessary to reexamine assumptions.I first faced the issues involved in using the Internet for research when I was writing the article on Cooperative Collection Development for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science.[1] I was using Google to look for additional information on the specific collection agreements that I had found in the literature. In one case, I located an update in a source that was exactly what I was looking for; but I had concerns about using the information in my article for two reasons. First, the updated history was found in what appeared to be an internal document. Although I believe that it was clear enough that someone at that institution had decided to make the text available, I had my doubts about whether the author considered it to be a public document. Second, although I believe that the author was knowledgeable enough to provide accurate information about the agreement, she would not have been considered by many to be an appropriate spokesperson to give the history of the cooperative collection development agreement. In the end, I decided to use this source and provided a link to the document as it was then found on the Web. I would not have been surprised, however, if the author had sent me an e-mail that questioned the appropriateness of citing her internal document in a paper.What I wish to do in this article is to provide some preliminary thoughts on the topic of the ethics of using Internet resources and to define more clearly the issues involved. I do not have any clear-cut answers but believe that it is appropriate to the discussion. I will limit my analysis to research that is to be published in some official format either in print or electronically. I do not wish to consider the issue of competitive intelligence, since I believe that a completely different set of ethical guidelines would apply in this case. Finally, I will use library examples in this article because I am most familiar with my own discipline though I believe that the proposed ethical principles would apply to other areas.The Issue of Publication and PrivacyBefore the arrival of the Internet, most scholarly research relied upon documents. By the very act of publishing, the author intended to make these documents public and to share the information contained within them with the scholarly community. In fact, the academic world continues to reward authors whose works are frequently cited and to judge them to be more credible because their peers have found their work to be worth citing. Before the Internet, the exception was the use of unpublished source materials, most frequently found in archives and other sources. The owners of these materials, however, frequently imposed restrictions upon their use-sometimes required by the authors/donors as a condition for the gift or sale-and screened users for valid research purposes. In a similar way, much grey literature[2] and many internal documents were theoretically available; but researchers had to know what they were looking for and where it was located. They then often needed to travel to the site, fill out complex forms, and find ways to record their findings for future use.The Internet has opened a whole new area for potential research. Although much of the Internet remains private in the sense that researchers must know where to go and then either register or pay to get access[3], the open Web includes an incredible amount of potentially useful information. …