  Data sharing partnerships are increasingly an imperative for research
institutions and, at the same time, a challenge for established models of data
governance and ethical research oversight. We analyse four cases of data
partnership involving academic institutions and examine the role afforded to
the research partner in negotiating the relationship between risk, value, trust
and ethics. Within this terrain, far from being a restraint on
financialisation, the instrumentation of ethics forms part of the wider
mobilisation of infrastructure for the realisation of profit in the big data
economy. Under what we term `combinatorial data governance' academic structures
for the management of research ethics are instrumentalised as organisational
functions that serve to mitigate reputational damage and societal distrust. In
the alternative model of `experimental data governance' researchers propose
frameworks and instruments for the rethinking of data ethics and the risks
associated with it - a model that is promising but limited in its practical
application.
