Academia-Industry Big Data Collaboration for Early Career Researchers program: Developing organizational expertise and resources for the responsible conduct of research with human generated and publicly available data

Researchers frequently collect, use, and analyze publicly available data from social networking platforms, online production communities, and customer review websites, among other sources, as part of their research activities. Technically, it can be feasible and straightforward to access and obtain public data, while considering the ethics, norms, and regulations applicable to these data requires additional awareness, knowledge and skills. This is partially due to the fact that multiple types of rules may apply. We provide an overview on these types of regulations, and also clarify on common misassumptions between free as in “free speech” (i.e. freedom from restriction, "libre") versus free as in free beer (i.e. freedom from cost, "gratis"). We outline several approaches to responsibly conducting research with publicly available data, and solutions to enhancing the expertise of researchers on implement data regulations, especially for the case of human centered data science.