Cerbara, L., Germani, D. and Santurro, M. (2026) ‘Ethical Implications in Building Longitudinal Data Infrastructures’, in Taddei, L. and Paolucci, M. (eds.) Longitudinal Data Infrastructures in Europe: Tools for Open Science in Social Science Research. Cham: Springer Nature, pp. 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-07005-0_4

Cerbara, Germani and Santurro treat ethics as an infrastructural property rather than an external regulatory checkpoint. Their analysis of European longitudinal studies shows that openness, reuse and long-term data accumulation produce persistent tensions around privacy, consent, re-identification and public trust. The key conceptual move is embedded ethics: ethical reflection should enter study design, consent procedures, communication, data-sharing strategies and technical development from the beginning rather than being applied after the system has already been constituted. Longitudinality intensifies this requirement because repeated observations create forms of informational persistence whose future combinations cannot be completely anticipated. The chapter therefore understands trust as something technically and institutionally produced through safeguards, transparent communication and accountable governance. Its bridge to infrastructure studies is precise: technical robustness and legal compliance are insufficient unless systems remain socially responsive to those whose data sustain them. Ethics becomes an architecture of continued permission, defining the conditions under which durable knowledge infrastructures can remain open without converting accessibility into extraction.