The Working Group Ethics (WGE) provides a space to discuss ethical questions—distinguished as best as possible from legal questions—arising across different NFDI consortia and to develop useful knowledge and guidance to help address these questions.

The WGE holds bi-monthly general meetings as well as regular study group meetings. The study groups consist of members of the WGE who work together on a particular topic. There are currently two active study groups:

• Study Group Dark Data
• Study Group CARE Principles
• Study Group AI Ethics

Participation in the WGE and its study groups is open to all members of the NFDI, regardless of background and consortium or section affiliation. Members of the German science and research community who are not affiliated with an institution participating in the NFDI are also welcome. Our meetings are held in English.
Contact person: Thomas Richter

Mailing list: https://lists.nfdi.de/postorius/lists/section-elsa-wg-ethics.lists.nfdi.de/

The Working Group Data Protection facilitates exchange on FAIR data management and data protection regulations within the NFDI community. A key outcome of its work is a factsheet series that helps researchers align FAIR principles with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. The factsheets are available here.

The group meets bi-monthly, beginning with a Lean Coffee session where participants discuss current challenges and experiences. This is followed by impulse presentations and open discussions on topics such as legal aspects of AI and data protection, data anonymity, and secure data handling.

By sharing expertise and supporting the development of educational materials, the Working Group fosters awareness and best practices in data protection.

Contact persons: Oliver Watteler, Katharina Deschler 

Mailing list: https://lists.nfdi.de/postorius/lists/section-elsa-wg-data-protection.lists.nfdi.de/ 

The Working Group Licensing & Agreement Rule Automation (LARA) is the newest working group in ELSA. It will be focusing on tools, which aim to help researchers choose an appropriate license for their outputs (data, code etc).

Currently, there are at least two tools that seek to simplify licensing and data usage agreements for researchers in different contexts:

• https://github.com/izus-fokus/LicenseChecker 

The License Checker can be used and tested here: https://checklicense.uni-stuttgart.de/

The License Checker is a web based tool to support researchers to choose an appropriate open source license for their research software or code. It gives an overview over common open source licenses and offers to upload code and dependency files to check for existing licenses and suggest compatible licenses.

• https://github.com/IPK-BIT/odrl-builder

The ODRL Builder can be used and tested here: https://odrl.gi.denbi.de/

The primary goal of this project is to develop a web application for creating data use agreements (DUA) in a way that allows automated evaluation of access permissions. Specifically, we want to adhere to the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) standard and model permissions and prohibitions for the use of digital objects.

WG Lara will offer a forum for legal and technical discussions around these topics as well as explore the possibility of further developing and integrating the existing tools (e.g. include ODRL Metadata for software or be able to create custom licenses from building blocks).

We will be looking into other groups with similar focus and ensure collaboration on various aspects in order to minimize the efforts across the disciplines.

More details about the meeting structure and dates will follow.

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Contact person: Constantin Breß

Mailingliste: https://lists.nfdi.de/postorius/lists/section-elsa-wg-lara.lists.nfdi.de