Paper short abstract:

Datamanagement policies introduce new forms of academic governance. Their demands for transparency in the name of integrity can upset qualitative researchers because they may violate principles of maintaining social relationships during and after ethnographic research. This paper argues that such issues require anthropologists globally to clarify such principles.

Paper long abstract:

Datamanagement policies introduced by universities, national funding agencies, international journals and European government are changing academic governance and its attendant protocols of research integrity and ethics. Anthropologists can be upset by such demands, because they force transparency in the name of integrity (as Open Access and the reduction of scientific fraud) that do not take much account of the maintenance of ethically responsible relationships with participants in qualitative social research. As a result of a lack of awareness of the co-production of research materials and its consequences for ethnographic reporting, of commodified conceptions of ”data”, and of a mutilated notion of the process of research, datamanagement policies frequently forget about or ignore major ways in which research materials are processed into publishable or open access bits of knowledge. This paper argues that anthropologists have to spell out such principles for international audiences in order to avoid unethical behavior to result from such new forms of ethical governance.