Ethics and society review in the digital sciences: barriers, enabling factors, and opportunities

Ethics review has traditionally focused on studies involving human participants. This is not
an appropriate framework for the digital sciences (AI, data science, computational social
science, and digital humanities), which may not have human participants, but nevertheless
have big societal implications. We are starting to see initiatives to expand the scope of ethics
review to include societal impact, and to help authors responsibly collect large amounts of
data, or develop new media technology. Our proposal aims to 1) conduct a literature review
to determine the state of knowledge on this issue, 2) conduct a short survey of Dutch
research institutions to understand how they see this challenge and the extent to which they
take account of societal impacts in their ethics review processes, and 3) conduct some
qualitative interviews (<10) with selected universities to provide a better understanding of the
survey results.