Complimenti @gurgite , and Merry Christmas!
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Congratulations to @tanja.baudson!
@Jelle published a letter about starting a repository for EU animal health studies
Happy new year! 
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I find this a very interesting paper from @Daniel-Mietchen !
I do however feel that ethics statements should not per se be standardized. From a regulatory point of view, it is also often a bit more complex. Under the clinical trial regulation, for example, an ethics committee provides a “positive opinon”, while a Dutch ethics committee for a non-drug study provide a “declaration of no objection” or a "declaration of not falling under the wet medisch onderzoek met mensen (WMO). These are fundamentally different things (e.g. in the latter case, the EC did not have a look at the content of the project itself).
Additionally, in the case of clinical trials in the EU, your one ethics statement or the one EC you mention is not competent to speak for all sites in the first place. Therefore, these nuances should still be able to be put in a publication to make sure the reader can assess whether the research was carried out ethically/had all positive opinions in place. Even with the possiility for “free text” now, this is hardly ever possible.
Thank you! It’s not what my research is usually about but it was fun! How did you get to know about it? I hadn’t notified IGDORE yet!
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I got notified by Google Scholar. Many congratulations on a very interesting paper! So what is special about this paper in comparison to what you usually do? Just wondering.
@Daniel-Mietchen 's paper made quite an impression on Twitter where it has been retweeted and commented on several times. Here are some of the comments:
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I usually work more on empathy, theory of mind and indirect communication in neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, so… the Pragmatics side of that article, rather than the legal aspects (we worked with a law expert for that matter).
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Thanks for looking into this, @Jelle ! One of the purposes of the paper was precisely to have conversations like this.
I share your view that the different components of such statements can have different roles, yet I am puzzled as to why you would conclude on that basis that standardization is to be avoided. Perhaps we mean different things by that?
To me, the diversity in this space indicates the need to standardize the way these components and roles and their relationships are described, ideally based on a comprehensive mapping of the landscape.
Simplifying a bit, an ethics statement could be a set of phrases of the kind , where each of these fields (which may themselves have more than one component) could be populated from controlled vocabularies that would include things like your “positive opinion” or the “declaration of no objection” or the “declaration of not falling under the wet medisch onderzoek met mensen (WMO)”.
Yes, early iterations of such standards are likely going to miss some nuances, but common use cases should be fairly straightforward to map out, and further iterations of any such standard can be informed by cases where the earlier framework did not fit, i.e. where the people involved consciously and informedly chose the free-text options over the controlled ones.
I’d be happy to dig deeper into this with you or anyone else thinking along.
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@Emanuel_Larsson Some great images indeed, and nice choice of a model system. Could you provide the individual images underlying Fig.4 (and indeed any of the other figures) as high-res, without those legend letters, arrows and the scale bar’s legend (leaving the scale bar itself in would be fine but is not necessary)? I’d like to upload them to Wikimedia Commons to facilitate reuse in Wikipedia articles and elsewhere.
See Imaging - Wikipedia for a live demo.
I don’t think this counts as “quite an impression” - one of these accounts is a co-author of the paper, the other is the journal in which the paper appeared.
Perhaps more interesting are the actual access stats of article, figure and tables, which indicate that a few dozen people have taken a deeper dive into the paper so far: Mining the literature for ethics statements: A step towards standardizing research ethics .
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Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your clarification!
Your publication is very interesting and I agree that the controlled options would improve over time. Personally, I just do not see an added value in standardizing these statements. Perhaps I am missing some aim, but putting in the guidelines for authors that you need to comments on a set number of things (such as reference number, type of informed consent, type of opinion by the EC, why an opinion was not requested) seems enough for me.
The fact that informed consent documents will become publicly available in the EU under CTR is a much more important step for me in assessing whether patients were duly informed and consented.
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Oh wow, the lego man is now famous on Wikipedia
I am happy to say I have met him in person at the 4D imaging lab in Lund. @Emanuel_Larsson, you should let Steve know about this, I’m sure he would be pretty excited!
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