Quoting Marcela Musgrove <mmusgrove@gmail.com>:
I personally don't think they are, but could see it as potentially being exploitative since the researcher is usually getting paid or amassing their own reputation points and would probably not be rewarding the online subject.
Does the transaction have to be one-to-one or might referred reward offset the concern? I ask because, folks in publicly available sites often gain and lose reputation points on the local system, of course the reputation systems - academic and say chatroom or blog - are not the exact same systems. I don't doubt that on some of the adolescent sites reputation points might be granted for the participant having been cited or quoted in a published paper. I believe there are positives as well as negative aspects of being a participant in a study...we just tend to gravitate toward the negatives more easily...it's a human-being thing. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com