Dear list members, We are in the process of submitting a manuscript of a paper within which we use, as our corpus, the archives of a mailing list (namely the Computational Chemistry List, http://www.ccl.net/). Some results of this work on this corpus have been presented at SHOT 2012 in Copenhagen (http://www.sigcis.org/workshop12/Hocquet) for those who remember (and yes, this is very slow science). This kind of corpus raises the issue of unveiling identities and quotations of the mailing list posters in the manuscript. Even though the archives of the list are publicly accessible on the web, and even though the posters did sign a disclaimer when posting to the list, our question is whether, and to what extent, it could be considered unethical, regarding publication in an academic journal, to disclose their identities. A radical solution to preserve posters privacy could be to anonymize the identities and quotations of the mailing list posters. But we believe that the details of the background, status, opinions, worldviews... of the actors are of prime interest for our discussion of their debates within the mailing list. Our concern is thus to respect the privacy of posters without losing useful sociological details in the process. For example, we believe it is a useful information in the dynamics of the debates in the corpus that a poster has a specific academic position, is involved or not in the founding of an entrepreneurial structure, what is their role in the developing of specific software packages....which even raises the issue of privacy of pieces of software as well as humans... As we have never been confronted to this issue in our previous manuscripts, we are in need of ethical guidelines, or, even more helpful, pieces of advice on our specific case study. Thank you in advance for your answers. Yours, -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Université de Lorraine & Archives Henri Poincaré Alexandre.Hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet ***********************************************