Rethinking Research Ethics in Digital Times: Report Launch and Discussion
On behalf of the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) cross-project initiative CREI (Community Research Ethics Initiative), funded through the CHANSE Knowledge Exchange Facilitators (CHANSE KEF), we are delighted to invite PRG members and beyond to the launch of CREI’s report Rethinking Research Ethics in Digital Times on Wednesday 4 March 2026, at 10:00-12.30 CET, online on MS Teams.
To register your attendance, please follow the link here: https://forms.office.com/e/U79dQQ6GJi
- This event aims to bring together national and international leaders setting policy and practice related to research ethics across Europe.
- It offers a forum to discuss challenges, share insights and strengthen ethical frameworks around humanities and social science research.
- The report offers guidelines for this work, which will be discussed on the day.
- A short video explaining the report’s key findings will be shared a few weeks after the event.
Overview
Current research ethics protocols across Europe struggle to deal with the digital traces of human participants, their identities, and their communities. Ethics protocols that are ill equipped for the contingent nature of digital research and its challenges can erode trust, frustrate and burden participants unnecessarily, and impede collaboration. This predicament generates inefficiencies in the use of academic resources and leads to a lack of appropriately comparative research that can address important issues of contemporary digital societies.
In response, the Community Research Ethics Initiative has developed new recommendations for ethical procedures that universities, funders and regulators across Europe can adopt to ensure healthy, ethical, and productive research that addresses the urgent social challenges of contemporary society.
We invite you to join us to discuss these issues, learn about our research, and explore how you can make use of the newly launched report.
Event Programme
10:00 am – 10:15 am | Opening Session
- Welcome and introduction to the Community Research Ethics Initiative team
- Housekeeping and Platform Overview
10:15 am – 11:00 am | Keynote Panel: Community Research Ethics Initiative
The panellists will cover:
- The state of ethical protocols across Europe.
- Vulnerability and sensitive subjects in ethics.
- Digital research questions, such as the use of online data, anonymity in online interaction, digital publication and data storage questions, and open access to data sets and results.
- Transnational collaboration and asymmetric ethics review protocols and procedures.
- Recommendations and how they can be implemented.
11:00 am – 11:20 am | Small group discussions of report conclusions
11:20 am – 11:40 am | Feedback from small group discussions
11:40 am – 11:50 am | Break
11:50 am – 12:20 pm| Full-group discussion
This session is designed to engage in a dialogue with ethics scholars and practitioners, and to build networks.
12:20 pm – 12:30 pm | Closing remarks and distribution of the report.
