The contribution of neuroethics to international brain research initiatives

Building a responsible innovation toolkit as project legacy

This article explores whether and in what way it is possible to employ toolkits for responsible research and innovation (RRI toolkits) as mechanisms for ensuring the legacy of RRI in research projects. Based on a review of the concept of responsible research and innovation as well as existing toolkits in the area, the article offers an account of the development of an RRI toolkit in the context of the EU- funded Human Brain Project. This toolkit is designed to integrate insights and practices of responsible research and innovation developed over a 10 year period into the project legacy, the EBRAINS research infrastructure. The article suggests that toolkits have the potential to contribute to ensuring a long- lasting legacy of work undertaken in responsible research and innovation, but that this potential requires further support from institutions and the broader research environment to become realized.

The role of ethics in data governance of large neuro-ICT projects

Objective

We describe current practices of ethics-related data governance in large neuro-ICT projects, identify gaps in current practice, and put forward recommendations on how to collaborate ethically in complex regulatory and normative contexts.

Methods

We undertake a survey of published principles of data governance of large neuro-ICT projects. This grounds an approach to a normative analysis of current data governance approaches.

Results

Several ethical issues are well covered in the data governance policies of neuro-ICT projects, notably data protection and attribution of work. Projects use a set of similar policies to ensure users behave appropriately. However, many ethical issues are not covered at all. Implementation and enforcement of policies remain vague.

Conclusions

The data governance policies we investigated indicate that the neuro-ICT research community is currently close-knit and that shared assumptions are reflected in infrastructural aspects. This explains why many ethical issues are not explicitly included in data governance policies at present. With neuro-ICT research growing in scale, scope, and international involvement, these shared assumptions should be made explicit and reflected in data governance.

Beyond Research Ethics: Dialogues in Neuro-ICT Research

The increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help facilitate neuroscience adds a new level of complexity to the question of how ethical issues of such research can be identified and addressed. Current research ethics practice, based on ethics reviews by institutional review boards (IRB) and underpinned by ethical principlism, has been widely criticized. In this article, we develop an alternative way of approaching ethics in neuro-ICT research, based on discourse ethics, which implements Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) through dialogues. We draw on our work in Ethics Support, using the Human Brain Project (HBP) as empirical evidence of the viability of this approach.