Privacy and Research Information Management Systems

Abstract

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. You are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests we endorse you or your use. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. We understand this to allow use in a for-profit environment for for-profit projects, so long as the article itself is not monetized without permission.This paper is a case study of privacy considerations in the adoption of a Research Information Management (RIM) Systems. RIM Systems collect, store, and link together metadata for research, service, grants, and teaching activity. Sometimes called Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) or Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR), these systems enable institutions to collect data from different internal systems and combine it with external information, providing a more holistic perspective on university activity.They provide a single, authoritative source of this data and allow for multiple stakeholders (i.e. faculty, administration, IT, HR, library, communications) to query, analyze, download, visualize, and share it. Oklahoma State University (OSU) recently adopted a RIM System, which is being implemented and supported by the OSU Libraries.A defining factor in the decision making process for product selection was how each system addressed issues around privacy. This case study will review some of the central data privacy considerations at play in the adoption of RIM Systems at both the institutional and individual level. This will include data sharing, ownership, retention, right to reuse data, data deletion obligations upon contract termination, user access to privacy policies, and user data controls. Questions to ask before adoption, key institutional players in discussions of privacy, and issues that may arise after adoption of a Research Information Management System will also be addressed.