Issue: 39 (December 2017)
Focus on: Ethics in the use and communication of information in professional, academic and research environments.
Coordinators: Concepción Rodríguez-Parada: crodriguezp@ub.edu and Rubén Comas-Forgas: rubencomas@uib.es
Deadline for submissions: June 2017
Authors' guidelines: https://bid.ub.edu/en/authors-guidelines
The ethical, legal and socially significant use of information is one of the main pillars supporting the concepts of Information Literacy and Information Skills. An informationally literate person or organization has the ability to access, use, manage and communicate information, in any field and circumstance, while observing and practising the values of honesty and social responsibility. However, in spite of this, there are many signs (and, often, evidence) that show that these principles are frequently flouted. Some well-known cases are the following: deceptions, such as in the case of ENRON (not at all rare in the business and financial world), in which the company's accounting was deliberately manipulated and altered; premeditated tampering and falsification of military reports to "justify" military action, for instance, by the British and United States governments prior to the 2003 Iraq War, with the consequent loss of human lives; academic plagiarism in doctoral dissertations, with the former German minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg being one example of this; andthe fraud committed by the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who announced in 2005 that he had obtained stem cells from human embryos cloned from several patients when in actual fact he had faked the results of his experiments.
The BID's special issue 39 is intended for papers that address ethics in the use and communication of information in professional, academic and research environments from any field of knowledge and from any theoretical and research approach. Some of the areas and issues to be considered are:
a) Ethical, truthful and legal use of information in professional spheres: what knowledge and what skills are needed to become an informationally literate professional? Which professionals display better ethical skills in the use, management and transmission of information in the work environment? And what are their main features? What consequences arise from unethical use of information in the professional sphere? How do the codes of ethics address this issue? Professional ethics with respect to the use of information: examples, obstacles, potentialities and future prospects.
b) Academic integrity and use of information in teaching-learning processes: how is responsible, honest use of information to be fostered in the performance of assignments and academic activities by students? Academic plagiarism and other fraudulent practices: situation, causes, consequences and strategies for avoiding them; plagiarism detection systems and software: types, functionality and future prospects; students' and teachers' information skills.
b) Academic integrity and use of information in teaching-learning processes: how is responsible, honest use of information to be fostered in the performance of assignments and academic activities by students? Academic plagiarism and other fraudulent practices: situation, causes, consequences and strategies for avoiding them; plagiarism detection systems and software: types, functionality and future prospects; students' and teachers' information skills.
c) Ethics in research and scientific communication: review and control processes, and editorial policies for preventing inappropriate use of information in scientific publications; honesty in scientific communication; consequences of dishonesty and fraud in scientific production and communication; ethics committees as guarantors of scientific good practices; is the pressure to publish scientific results ("publish or perish") a factor that has increased dishonest practices among researchers? Consequences of dishonest practices in the production and communication of scientific information; open-access science and big data and ethics in the use of information: dangers, controversies, potentialities, control measures, etc.
d) Ethics in information units and services: is the confidentiality of users' data guaranteed? Where should the line be drawn as regards exemption from this confidentiality? Finding the balance between users' interests and intellectual property rights; precipitated or sensationalist dissemination of information without sufficient scientific support; the neutrality of professionals; ethics and the law, etc.
e) General aspects: social and cultural factors and aspects related with the ethical use of information; the media and the communication and treatment of information; use of information in communication processes related with social media and ICTs in general.
