Revisiting the Obligation to Share Aggregate Results with Research Participants in the Era of Open Science

Open science initiatives, intended to democratize access to research products, have made steady progress in shifting the global science culture toward practices like preregistration and data sharing. However, current open science efforts have not yet addressed the special obligation to ensure that research results are made accessible to the portion of the general population who contribute most directly to scientific advances: research participants. In this article, we explore the ethical obligation to communicate aggregate results to research participants and consider elements of open science infrastructure that could be amended for this purpose. We consider open questions for implementation related to the methods, timing, potential harms, oversight, and incentives for communicating aggregate results and pose solutions that could, following the example of open science initiatives, succeed in nudging investigators to reciprocate the efforts of research participants by sharing the scientific findings they helped to advance.