Does an article that discusses anonymized student projects about how to catalog data count as research on human subjects?
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One of the students included in the paper thought so, and complained to the journal after learning that it had published the case study of the program without the approval required for studying people. The authors admitted they didn’t get consent from participants, because they didn’t realize the work required it. The mix-up has prompted both them and the journal to reconsider their policies regarding ethics approval of studies.
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In the meantime, “A Project-Based Case Study of Data Science Education” has been retracted, with this notice:
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“It has come to the attention of the Data Science Journal Editors that the authors of the paper “A Project-Based Case Study of Data Science Education” (Turek, Suen and Clark, 2016) did not seek the necessary approval for research involving human subjects prior to conducting their study. In addition, they failed to obtain consent from research participants before publication. The article has therefore been retracted. In the interests of protecting the identity of the research participants, we have also withdrawn the contents of the article from the published record.
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Data Science Journal requires that all research involving human subjects is conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (or equivalent framework) and, if appropriate, has been approved by the local institutional research ethics committee.

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