Introducing Open Ethics

Researchers at the School of Psychology must adhere to the Research Ethics Guidelines set out by the British Psychology Society. In order to provide a governance structure around this the School has a committee that carries out ethical review on all of the School’s research.

We believe that the management of research ethics should be simple, standardised and open. By re-engineering the School of Psychology’s current online ethics system (with Python and Django), we are creating a system that makes the workflow of ethical approval efficient, intuitive and scalable.

Open Ethics is configurable, to fit the workflow of individual groups, whilst providing a standardised interface for ethical review data. This simplifies reporting both at the local and institutional level, as well as streamlining collaboration between groups.

By releasing all of this as an open source project we will not only reduce the cost of ownership, but also encourage other institutions to adopt, and contribute towards the system.

Today we finally started development on the project! Zaim Dolrani, Ayoola Adegbite and  Pandu Purbasany, who are MSc students with the School of Computational Sciences have joined the project and are going to be contributing towards it as the basis of their dissertation (co-supervised by Prof. Simon Thompson of CS). We will be hosting the code base on GitHub (http://github.com/UoK-Psychology/Openethics) , and we hope to start pushing code up to the public repository ASAP.

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