Simon Knight (University of Technology, Sydney)
Artificial intelligence, like other emerging technologies, has foregrounded both novel and pre-existing ethical issues. This is true in many contexts including in our engagement with research – as researchers, research informed practitioners, participants, and other stakeholders. Understanding these ethical issues, and how both researchers and others can engage with them is a key challenge for both oversight of ethical research, and engagement with stakeholders, from members of the public, to ethics committee members, and peer reviewers.
As a result of this challenge, there have been calls for new ethics policies for university research ethics committees, or/and editorial policy for scholarly venues (Ada Lovelace Institute et al., 2022; Partnership on AI, 2021; Srikumar et al., 2022). A recent collaboration between Simon Knight (lead author) and the editors-in-chief of, AJET, BJET, and JLA has developed new policies for the expression of research ethics across disciplines, aiming to address these calls.
Emerging technologies and research ethics: Developing editorial policy using a scoping review and reference panel, was published in November 2024 in PLOS ONE. By using a scoping review the authors identified current and emerging research ethics publication policies and practices. These were drawn on to develop policies aiming to foster learning and dialogue regarding ethical issues.
Academic outputs, conference and journal papers, are the primary mode of communication for academics, whether with other researchers, policy-makers, or practitioners and the wider public. Because academics are incentivised to publish, and venues have a role in oversight of reporting of research ethics, they are a key part of the ethics eco-system (Knight et al., 2024). Research often involves trade-offs or complexity in navigating how to operationalise key ethical principles (e.g., Kitto & Knight, 2019; Knight et al., 2023; Knight & Kitto, 2020). But we often gloss over ethical tensions we face (coverage is often limited to “this study was approved by HREC-XXXX”). How can other researchers, or stakeholders in general learn about and engage with these tensions when our main communications typically don’t discuss them? This limits our ability to learn from each other, and risks diminishing public trust in science. If we want to learn about the values and ethical systems we work with, we have to talk about the values and ethical systems we work with.
The policies developed, grounded in the scoping review and knowledge as editors-in-chief, centre learning to provide template guidelines for authors, reviewers, and editors. The intent of the policy templates is that they can inform scholarly communities in considering their practices, and in developing models that centre the role of dialogue and learning in the expression of research ethics.
References
The full piece is available open access, alongside an open data publication containing the policy templates.
Knight, S., Viberg, O., Mavrikis, M., Kovanović, V., Khosravi, H., Ferguson, R., Corrin, L., Thompson, K., Major, L., Lodge, J., Hennessy, S., & Cukurova, M. (2024). Emerging technologies and research ethics: Developing editorial policy using a scoping review and reference panel. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309715
Knight, S., Viberg, O., Mavrikis, M., Kovanovic, V., Khosravi, H., Ferguson, R., Corrin, L., Thompson, K., Major, L., Lodge, J., Hennessy, S., & Cukurova, M. (2024). Supplement to: How do we learn about research ethics from published research? Developing editorial policy for emerging technologies using a scoping review and reference panel. [Dataset and Supplementary Files]. figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26013130
Ada Lovelace Institute, CIFAR, & Partnership on AI. (2022). A Culture of Ethical AI: Report. CIFAR. https://partnershiponai.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/08/CIFAR-AI-Insights-EN-AM-220803-1.pdf
Kitto, K., & Knight, S. (2019). Practical ethics for building learning analytics. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12868
Knight, S., & Kitto, K. (2020). How do educational technology developers ensure that their products have positive impact, and don’t cause harm? British Educational Research Association (BERA) Blog. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/how-do-educational-technology-developers-ensure-that-their-products-have-positive-impact-and-dont-cause-harm
Knight, S., Shibani, A., & Buckingham Shum, S. (2023). A reflective design case of practical micro-ethics in learning analytics. British Journal of Educational Technology, 54(6), 1837–1857. Scopus. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13323
Knight, S., Shibani, A., & Vincent, N. (2024). Ethical AI governance: Mapping a Research Ecosystem. AI and Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-023-00416-z
Partnership on AI. (2021). Managing the Risks of AI Research Six Recommendations for Responsible Publication. Partnership on AI. https://partnershiponai.org/workstream/publication-norms-for-responsible-ai/
Srikumar, M., Finlay, R., Abuhamad, G., Ashurst, C., Campbell, R., Campbell-Ratcliffe, E., Hongo, H., Jordan, S. R., Lindley, J., & Ovadya, A. (2022). Advancing ethics review practices in AI research. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1–4
Author bio
Associate Professor Simon Knight is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, Transdisciplinary School. He is a past Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics