Our assessment of a research study relies primarily on your answers, statements and descriptions in the application form. Generally, we do not ask for submission of any additional documents.

In the case that we find further documents to be relevant for our assessment, we may ask you to provide these documents in the course of the procedure.

Yes, in exceptional cases we also provide an ethics review and ethics outcome letter to studies that have already been conducted. However, any such study will not be eligible for fasttrack and enter the regular review process.

Any WU researcher from any department, competence center, or research institute can submit an application for an ethics review by the WU Ethics Board.

We only review studies where the authors include at least one WU researcher, and the WU researcher has to be the corresponding author for the application.

We generally do not conduct ethics review for WU Bachelor or Master theses (even if they include collection or use of human beings data). The respective supervisor of the BA/MA thesis will be responsible to review the study design and procedures and provide advice on its research ethics to the student.

Since we just established the WU Ethics Board and are starting our work, we cannot rely on any experiences here and cannot make any promises.

The WU Ethics Board is planning to meet about monthly. So for <b>regular reviews</b> where your application needs discussion by the full board, it may take up to 4 weeks, depending on when you submit.

However, our goal is to review most studies (70-80%) in a <b>fast-track process</b> as they may not need in-depth discussion at a meeting. In these cases, it may only take 1-2 weeks to get a result.

The exception are studies which only use existing datasets that already been collected under an ethics approval. These studies will receive <b>"exempt" status</b> (i.e. they do not need to undergo ethics review), and a letter stating as much will be issued immediately.

More and more research projects try to tackle research questions with the complementary utilization of different methods. If your project uses different methods, please just submit one application.

Complete the form (checklist, project description) with all methods in mind. Details can be explained in the free-text fields in the project description. Although we ask for brevity, there is no limit in these form fields.

Researchers at WU use a wide variety of methodologies. In our application form, we tried hard to use questions and wording that integrate the most common methods used at WU. We also often add clarifications or examples to the questions.

However, some terminology might still be difficult to understand, in particular if the questions refer to a method you have no or little experience with.

In these cases, please first consult the clarifications and examples, as well as the FAQs because they may cover your question. If still unclear, you may also contact us by email to solicit clarification (and we may then improve our explanations here).

Other than that, please just complete the application form to the best of your understanding and knowledge. You may use the freeform text fields in the application to express any doubts or clarifications.

No, at WU, ethics review of study using or collect data about/from human beings is not compulsory. Any WU researcher is free to obtain an ethics review for her/his study from the WU ethics board, or not.

This website and the application form will only be provided in English language.

However, you may complete the application form in German language, if you wish.

No, the approval of your study does not expire.

However, note that the board’s assessment only covers the research project as described in the application form. For a new research project, you will have to submit a new application.

The WU Ethics Board was established to provide advice and reviews on the ethicality of research projects that involve the collection or use of data from/about human beings.

As such, we will review your project if you plan to collect new data (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, decision experiment, interviews, (covert) observation, etc.) about and from humans. We will also review your project if you plan to use/analyze an existing dataset that includes data from human individuals.

We will not review other projects, in particular if the data is not collected from/about humans, or if the data is aggregated at a higher level (e.g. firm-level data, state-level data, country-level data, etc.).

If in doubt, you can contact us by email.

In many countries (such as the United States or Australia), ethical reviews of human beings research projects are mandated by law or national statements.
In the European Union, so far such regulation only exists for medical studies with humans. There is no EU law that mandates ethics review in the social sciences or humanities.

However, many universities in the EU have started to establish ethics review boards. Some universities require their researchers to obtain an ethics approval for human beings research, other universities such as WU offer ethics review but do not make it mandatory.

When designing our application form, we oriented ourselves at best practices at other universities in Austria, the EU, and world-wide, in terms of which questions to ask and which topics to cover. At the same time, we needed to cater to the large variety of methods and disciplines at WU. And we strived for brevity and focus on essentials. Ethics review is not supposed to be an obstacle for good research, but a complement.

We may not have an optimum in all dimensions at once. But our application form is both comprehensive and shorter than most other ethics review application forms we encountered. And we hope that our procedures will allow for a quick handling and passing of ethically impeccable research and at the same time help to flag ethical issues in WU research before they materialize.

By GDPR 4(1), "personal data" means any information about an identifiable person.

Note that:
<ul>
<li> A person is not only identifiable if the data includes name and address, but also when a combination of different characteristics in the data (e.g., university, gender, age, field of research) could lead to an identification of the person.</li>
<li> GDPR does <b>not</b> apply to truly anonymous data, that is, data that is sufficiently anonymized such that no individual person can be identified, even through combination of different data points.</li>
</ul>

GDPR outlines the principles of processing personal data, and ethical research follows these principles. However, GDPR also allows for exceptions to a number of its general regulations for scientific research purposes.

For research projects, personal data should only be kept in identifiable form when absolutely necessary for the research (e.g., re-contacting of study participants), for administrative purposes (e.g., payment of study participants), or due to legal requirements (e.g., for finance accounting). Whereever possible, data from research participants should be fully anonymized (no person can be identified anymore) or pseudonymized (such that a person cannot be identified in the main dataset but with a key list which is kept separately), or data should be collected anonymously in the first place.

Any personal data should be stored only in encrypted form, on password-protected computers or university storage resources provided for such purposes.

Sometimes, different principles of research ethics, such as transparency of data and methods on the one hand and data protection for research participants on the other hand, may appear in conflict with each other. In such cases, a well-considered solution should be sought. E.g., the researchers could publish an anonymized dataset with all possibly identifying information removed, or add noise to certain data such that identification is not possible anymore but research results can be reproduced.

The WU Ethics Board only considers applications submitted within the formal procedure. Yet, it aspires to provide guidance on how to meet ethical standards if applications do not meet the requirements.

You can find a useful introduction to human beings research ethics here:

<A HREF="https://globalhealthtrainingcentre.tghn.org/ethics-review-social-research-health-related-topics/" target="_blank">Free Online Course(with a biomedical focus, but still relevant) @ University of Oxford</A>

In general, we review research projects that rely on human beings providing personal information, their views, or other data in order to answer a research question.

Yet, scientific research may also be based on other input from people, such as technical expertise, feedback, or advice on the employment of certain equipment. While people assuming such a consultative role do not count as “research participants”, their involvement becomes relevant for ethics review if (and only if) they are exposed to significant risks due to their consulting role in the research project.

It's not easy to come up with relevant examples from social science research, but just to illustrate: if you are asking a co-worker on their *opinion* on a certain drug treatment that you want to test in your experiment, that would not be relevant. If you *expose* *them* to the drug by giving it to them, then it would be relevant.

In some disciplines, one research project consists of multiple studies, e.g., initial experiments and follow-up experiments.

If these sub-studies indeed address the same overarching research question and thus belong together, please just submit one application. Complete the form (checklist, project description) with all sub-studies in mind. Details can be explained in the free-text fields in the project description. Although we ask for brevity, there is no limit in these form fields.

If design-details of your later sub-studies may depend on the results of your initial sub-studies, try to include those contingency plans into your submission, such that you do not have to submit a new application for the later sub-studies.

The basic tenet in ethical considerations of research projects that involve human beings is the <b>balance between</b>
<ul>
<li>the <b>benefits of a study</b> (its contributions to the body of knowledge and/or society), and</li>
<li>the <b>risks and costs to human research subjects</b> which the study imposes on them (but also on researchers and their staff).</li>
</ul>
In short, to be ethical, a study must be beneficial enough to justify the risks and costs to human beings. If risks/costs are low (as in most of research at WU), then even small benefits are sufficient to outweigh them. If risks are high, then there need to be substantial benefits to justify them. Whether the benefit-risk ratio is considered sufficient, may depend on the norms of the particular academic community, but also on subjective assessment.

You, as the researcher, may have an incentive conflict when assessing this balance. For this reason, it is international practice to employ ethical review boards such as the WU Ethics Board to have independent scientific peers assess the tradeoff.

The WU Ethics Board comprises experts with different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds. As such, we will try to assess the benefits-risk ratio of submitted projects as expertly, efficiently, and objectively as possible.

If you are interested in these kind of questions: We are planning to offer workshops on human beings research ethics in the future. In the meantime, you may also be interested in PhD methods courses at WU that cover research ethics as part of their curriculum.

See also the links in FAQ "Does the ethics board offer consulting or training on ethical issues?" for some resources.