Addressing legal and ethical dimensions of the processing of personal data in research contexts: The DARIAH ELDAH Consent Form Wizard

One of the core concerns of research in the 21st century is to open up knowledge and science itself. This idea, at the heart of the Open Science movement, encompasses not only the idea of enabling democratic access to research results, but also a careful, responsible and transparent handling of the research process and the research objects themselves, especially when these objects are actually subjects (i.e. people). 

The ELDAH Consent Wizard project, co-funded through the DARIAH-EU Working Group funding scheme and the Austrian national CLARIAH-AT funding scheme, set out to develop a “consent form wizard” which enables digital scholars and the wider research infrastructure community to quickly and easily obtain a standardized, GDPR-compliant consent form that is legally valid in all of the European Union, and also sets a best practice for transparency and ethical conduct towards research (and hence data) subjects. Depending on the context for which consent is obtained (e.g. use of images of people, processing of information shared in surveys, collection/processing of personal data), wizard users receive a consent form tailored to their specific needs after answering a series of questions.