Recent research calls for data management infrastructures that explicitly operate within the bounds of ethical and legal constraints, and facilitate adherence to Open Science principles by integrating automated support for planning, collection, storage, use, reuse, and sharing of data within. Legal and ethical requirements of data processing have become increasingly complex, introducing administrative barriers to scientific research investigating data generated by human participants, which encompasses a vast majority of humanities research. In response to this, we present RUDI (“Research-centered User-oriented Data Infrastructure”), a modular framework grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by legal, computational and linguistic expertise. This paper introduces its first component; a configurable and dynamically adaptive consent form generator in the form of a “wizard” web application. We outline how legal aspects are modeled within, and highlight its concrete benefits for administrative aspects of research. Further, we discuss the contextualization of data within the research domain by leveraging the use of standardized ontology within the framework.

Linguistic data often inherits characteristics that limit open science practices such as data publication, sharing, and reuse. Part of the problem is researchers’ uncertainty about the legal requirements, which need to be considered at the beginning of study planning, when consent forms for participants, ethics applications, and data management plans need to be written. This paper presents a newly funded project that will develop a research data management infrastructure that will provide automated support to researchers in the planning, collection, storage, use, reuse, and sharing of data, taking into account ethical and legal aspects to encourage open science practices.