I recently attended an interesting conference on campus, Bioethics at the Crossroads: Where Public Health, Genomics, Data and Translational Science Meet. It was enlightening, and somewhat foreign, on many levels, but I was most struck by the differences in how ethicists and lawyers discuss data sharing as compared to how librarians discuss it. This reflects the different contexts of each group, but I think some of differences in language are arbitrary and can be resolved. I've been wanting to convene a session to start a campus-wide conversation about sharing data for some time now. After this, I'm convinced we need to start discussing how to enable data sharing across our institutional silos. There are a couple of initiatives, at the campus level and IU-wide, that this conversation could be linked with. Unfortunately, research data management and sharing are only small pieces of those initiatives. More thoughts on this to come...
A more tangible take-away was the draft International Code of Conduct for Genomic and Health-Related Data Sharing. This initiative is news to me, so I look forward to reading through the draft more thoroughly next week.