Socio-Economic Research in the Information Society

A User's Guide from the RESPECT Project

This guide is designed as an introduction to socio-economic research for the broader community of research users.

It will be of use to research funders, research hosts, research evaluators and reviewers, legal professionals providing advice to researchers, employers and managers of researchers and those involved, both as teachers and as students, in research training, as well as the broad community of socio-economic researchers themselves.

The RESPECT project involved analysing existing professional and ethical codes to identify the common ground between them, and putting this together with legal interpretations of the new data protection and intellectual property directives in order to produce a summary code of practice.

The resulting synthesis was then circulated widely throughout the European socio-economic research community in a broad consultation exercise and further revised in the light of comments received. The code which appears in this guide is the result.