A bitter whinge about research ethics boards - anyone else?

[Catabogus]

Sorry this is just going to be a rant. Is it me or are ethics review boards getting worse? I swear they exist basically to prevent research being done.

I have just had my second research ethics clearance application rejected in 2 months (in social sciences). This one is to start a project that is externally funded, all booked, overseas and extremely time sensitive. The method is basically just a small longitudinal survey.

It came back today with a big old “reject”! There are over 20 comments about the ways in which it’s problematic.

I am a pretty experienced researcher who has been doing this kind of survey in the relevant countries for 15 years. I submitted an almost identical research application 3 years ago (exactly the same project design, just to be carried out in a different, neighbouring country) which was approved with no issue - indeed the comment from the reviewer then said the ethics strategy was extremely well thought-out.

So if this application now is horribly unethical, you would think we must certainly have been doing something dreadfully wrong in <neighbouring country> for the last 3 years too, surely?? Should I immediately call that project off? I mean, I get that there must have been a different reviewer on that application, but it can’t be meant to be so variable, can it?

I can’t avoid the (probably unfair) sense that the ethics panels are now mainly staffed by very inexperienced researchers who are determined to find problems where none exist. Some of the “problems” they identify don’t even have any obvious ethical relevance - eg that a different kind of new-fangled survey might be better, or that I haven’t included a particular area of [non-ethics-related] literature in my overview. How is this within their remit?

is it just me? Anyone else find this? It would be good to know I’m not alone in thinking something has gone very wrong with this process somewhere.

Edited to remove auto-correct!

In theory, any project I'm involved in as a "researcher", I need to ask my IRB if that's ok, and before any data are collected. This includes literature reviews or processing anon published data, btw. It includes projects that already have several IRBs giving oversight and being led by multiple other institutions. If I didn't have a life, I would love to flood our IRB application portal with all my odd ideas, especially the ones that never progress.

Our IRB can take many many weeks to make a decision, they take August off, and even the simplest questions or process requires a lot of paperwork & revisions (which only get reviewed slowly, too). Even a systematic review would require filling in a personal safety checklist form, for instance, asking about duty of care in case I'm traumatised or lone working in people's private homes, etc.

@MedSchoolRat sounds like ours.The original application for the project I mentioned above went in in July. We got the feedback in september, got the revisions in November and are still waiting. We're actually gathered all the data at this stage but shh, don't tell anyone. Interestingly enough, none of our students were traumatised by being asked what they thought of the equipment.

We bid heavily and secure around 1 in 5 projects - why on earth would I want to facilitate reviews on the 4 unsuccessful ones?

Because the PI can't do the research they've been given the money for and will have to return the grant if their ethics approval is turned down?

Because, as the OP has found, if approval is done after the money has already been spent, it will be wasted?

We do a lot of fast turnaround work (humanitarian needs type stuff). We can turn urgent ethics applications around in 5 days if needed, as long as the candidate is responsive to feedback.

This is helpful, please keep doing it.

i do resent a bit their sometime patronising take on how academic could do better, especially re time management

I got sick of being leant on to do more and more and was working on stuff at 4am "because we'll have to return the grant if you can't make it work" (I'm technical services rather than PS BTW) and ended up on sick leave, burnt out and suicidal. A change of institution hasn't stopped the ridiculous requests but it has enabled me to have a fresh start with a more supportive line manager who has my back when I say "no" to things I cannot reasonably do.

Your lack of planning isn't my emergency and the slow cadence of other bits of the university (like ethics committee turn-arounds) isn't my emergency either.

I really do recommend that you plan for things to go wrong and for submissions be rejected the first time. Instruments don't care about your deadline when they develop faults, neither do computers, and neither does the instrument vendor.

Because the PI can't do the research they've been given the money for and will have to return the grant if their ethics approval is turned down?

A project won’t just be turned down and left to rot. Almost all projects will be asked to revise and resubmit initially, with requests for changes that’s are clear and hopefully easy to implement. These would normally be things like changing where data is stored from Dropbox to Onedrive, for instance.

At most, there might be aspects of a project we don’t approve (photographing school children in a foreign country being a memorable recent example) but the rest of the project can proceed. Or it might be that travel to a location is currently too difficult (eg Gaza atm), but we’d work with the applicant and the funder to shift towards remote data collection or local researchers. Even then we have a pretty high threshold - I have travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq with my university in recent years - they have hired security consultants to help do a specialised risk assessment and I’ve done hostile environments training at their expense.

A PhD student was told by our IRB that she couldn't use her personal phone number to arrange interviews (which were with clinical lead staff). She had to get another SIM or an allocated phone number. The vague concern was that she was at risk talking to strangers.

She was very confused. "This is my professional number I've had for years and that I want to use to continue to use in my (career) networking development. Can't I just block somebody if they are annoying me?" she asked. She didn't want to get a phone with dual SIMs or carry a 2nd phone or have to switch between SIMs. I think she finally managed to successfully appeal that one.

IRB are also dinosaurs about social media. They forbid me using my personal Twitter account for participant recruitment. The IRB thinks it's too dangerous (both reputation to Uni, and to me personally) for me to post "Hey would you like to fill in my survey? Here's a link." Great logic when the Uni just loves us to tweet about our projects, recently published studies, engage with questions about our research on SM, or to reshare other good Uni news.

@wacademia i am sure you get some ridiculous requests - but your take on how and when to approach ethics board is not in keeping with how they work.

@MedSchoolRat same experience here re phone numbers and social media. Annoying but i can see the ethical concern re personnal risk (super tenuous). What i don't get is the systematic review one? surely this falls under the general risk assessment (categories boredom, irriration at factual mistakes in paper) rather than genuine ethical consideration?

A PhD student was told by our IRB that she couldn't use her personal phone number to arrange interviews (which were with clinical lead staff). She had to get another SIM or an allocated phone number. The vague concern was that she was at risk talking to strangers.

That's entirely correct. First, the institution should provide what's needed for the study because the institution should be responsible for that equipment. If the student's personal phone was stolen, the student would have to find hundreds of pounds to replace it and would not be able to work until she did. A work phone can be left in the office drawer, reducing the risk of theft and loss, and its replacement would be covered by the university's insurance.

Second, having assisted a PhD student who was repeatedly harassed by someone she encountered in the course of her research, that "vague concern" is very valid. Blocking someone works until the blocked person changes their phone number or email address. VOIP makes getting a new phone number trivial. When this student's study ended, she was able to discard her work number and study mailbox and never read the vile filth this man was sending her ever again.

you obviously have a superior insight into everything research, wacademia.

what started a well justified rant thread is becoming as dementing as some workweek conversations

Technical Services staff serve many research groups and see the same issues crop up over and over again.

• Someone put all their work on an external drive and the drive has died. They don't have a backup.
• Someone put their data in OneDrive and has now left and the data is lost to the uni. That required a disclosure to the funding body, fun times.
• Someone has bought something without checking with TS that it will actually be suitable and now finds that it won't work.
• Something was set up by a long-gone RA, became essential to the research group, has broken, and no one knows the password to its admin interface.
• Someone brought equipment from another institution and we have nowhere to house it.

Much of the above being seasoned with "and the deadline for submitting the paper is on Friday".

So forgive me if I am sick of my academic colleagues blaming everyone bar themselves when things go wrong.

So forgive me if I am sick of my academic colleagues blaming everyone bar themselves when things go wrong.

A subset of academics are an absolute nightmare to work with. However taking your frustrations out on the people posting on this thread (and telling them they should do things that are not just undesirable, but impossible) is neither constructive nor fair.

Ethics boards would collapse if you needed REC clearance before submitting funding applications. They just would: sheer volume of work. On top of that, assuming a call comes out and there are 8 weeks to write an application before the deadline, that's not enough time to get ethics clearance in many places even if it was a good idea to seek it in the first place - which it's not. There's not a single institution I know of in which this would be permitted unless under very unusual circumstances.

The methodological issues raised by the OP are ludicrous and largely unrelated to ethics.

Technical staff are bloody brilliant and a lot of academic staff treat them terribly, despite their technical expertise being arguably more valuable. Whilst I don't agree about the argument that clearance should have been sought earlier @wacademia I do get completely why you are frustrated with academic behaviour in general terms.

A work phone can be left in the office drawer

Then it's not going to be used, is it. No one can use a phone while it sits in a drawer Especially not useful if one is going to Lebanon or Greece to talk to refugee relief agencies there.

I am not aware of anyone at my Uni ever being issued with a mobile that Uni-or a grant paid for, much less having Uni or a grant pay network access charges.

@wacademia : just out of curiousity, do you use Key Travel? I bet you think Key Travel offer a really good, useful and reliable service, don't you.

Wow this has taken off! I didn’t expect so many replies.

I’m glad I’m not alone here, but I’m sorry to hear that others have had such mad experiences with ethics boards too. What can we do about this? Should I volunteer to sit on the panel myself, and try to change things from within, or will that just drive me completely nuts? I don’t exactly have an abundance of spare time.

cowskeepingmeupatnight it sounds like you are doing a superb (and rare) job. Please PM us all with where you work and we’ll all apply for posts there!

wacademia while I totally understand why you and other PS/technical/admin support staff might be pissed off with lots of academics, I don’t really see what this has to do with ethics boards? It doesn’t sound like your role has any connection to ethics - and I’m pretty sure our ethics board is entirely staffed by the self-same kinds of academics you’re complaining about!

And - oh my god! - Key Travel. Don’t even get me started.

@MedSchoolRat
I am not aware of anyone at my Uni ever being issued with a mobile that Uni-or a grant paid for, much less having Uni or a grant pay network access charges.

I’m very surprised by this. At my uni people do have work mobile phones. The numbers listed in the uni directory are our work numbers. We’re not supposed to use personal phone numbers for work, or personal email addresses. It’s part of our information security policy.

We have work email addresses but the only phone numbers issued seem to be landlines at the Uni. I'm not aware that anyone has a 'work' social media account in own name. TEAMS calls are dominant now, not calls via a phone line. Or WhatsApp or Google meet... I have to get my laptop out if I'm at home for a TEAMS call, although I can take a TEAMS call on ipod too. I refuse to set my personal mobile up to do Office things for work because the Uni would then require biometric login every time I wanted to do anything else on my phone (like check the train times).

My limited experience is that WhatsApp still works if you have dual Sims in the same phone.

I can't imagine mobiles being issued to staff on 12 week temp contracts, but someone can find an old laptop or a hotdesk PC for temps or they may well end up using own laptops to work on OneDrive.

Key travel are the worst of the worst. 24 hour helpline my arse. An admin colleague of mine ended up booking flights on a Sunday on her personal credit card so that two academics who wouldn't do it could meet their students at a field trip venue as key travel hadn't answered her calls for three days. And she was the one who got shit from Finance. All sorted out when our boss got involved afterwards, but why they are the preferred choice of anyone other than a masochist is beyond me.

I sat on my institution's ethics committee until recently and was probably a bit rubbish. I found there was a lot of nit-picking for the sake of it - requests for alterations to applications that I just thought were petty and immaterial in reducing risk on any front. I also thought that sometimes reviewers overstepped the mark by commenting on aspects of research design - in other words, there may or may not have been problems with design but they didn't really have any bearing on ethics. I'm glad I'm not on it anymore.

Agree. It's very frustrating. I had my supervisor tell me to change the tone of one of my responses because, while he agreed the comments were ridiculous, he was weary it could be considered "snappy" and cause further delay on one of my studies. The need for deference is ridiculous. I was so fed up

I've submitted an annual renewal this week, and I'm already irritated

Here's something Aston's ethics board should have said a big fat "no" to: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus

Is that normal for universities to harvest and upload vast quantities of talk board discussions without consent as ‘corpora’ ? I’m flabbergasted.

Aston's VC is claiming that they legitimately hold the data. Mumsnet's ToS beg to differ.

I'd recommend reading the threads (1, now full, and 2, ongoing) on FWR about this too. Whether or not you agree with the dominant FWR stance re trans people, the story of how this was spotted and the governance questions surrounding how this PhD student's subject choice got to term three of year one without anyone saying "you might want to phrase that a little less libellously" are interesting.

The real problem is of course the theft of a dataset containing sensitive personal data about living people in the first place. The scraping academics knew what kind of data they were stealing, there's a conference video (attached, start at around 3h 17m) in which one of them is presenting findings and mentions the distinct language used by women undergoing fertility treatment.

imho, many posts on Mumsnet are blatently transphobic. The research is probably perfectly legit (I say probably because I can't be asked to repeat ethics review).

The haters brought this on themselves. Well done, I know you love to be outraged so you should be overjoyed.

If you encounter transphobic posts, report them. MNHQ are very quick to delete any transphobic posts.

However, believing in biological reality, that sex is immutable, that certain areas (e.g. changing rooms, sports, prisons, certain refuges, etc) should be single sex only is not transphobic.