Institutional Review Boards and Your Research: A Proposal for Improving the Review Procedures for Research Projects that Involve Human Subjects and Their Associated Identifiable Private Information

摘要

Researchers in computer science departments throughout the U.S. are violating federal law and their own organization s regulations regarding human subjects research and in most cases they don t even know it. The violations are generally minor, but the lack of review leaves many universities open to significant sanctions, up to and including the loss of all federal research dollars. The lack of review also means that potentially hazardous research has been performed without adequate review by those trained in human subject protection. We argue that much computer science research performed with the Internet today involves human subject data and, as such, must be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards including nearly all research projects involving network monitoring, email, Facebook, other social networking sites and many Web sites with user-generated content. Failure to address this issue now may cause significant problems for computer science in the near future.