Colleagues: As part of our effort on the ethics working committee to get a sense of cross-cultural differences concerning guidelines, procedures, and institutions that affect Internet research, we would be grateful for the assistance of the aoir folk in the following way. It is clear that relevant guidelines and decision-making procedures vary considerably from country to country. The typical United States university structure includes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that has oversight responsibility for university-based research, especially research that runs the risk of harming human subjects in some way. If only because the state of Internet research ethics is not as developed as, say, the ethical guidelines for anthropology, psychology, medicine, etc. - it appears that different university IRBs may be making considerably different sorts of decisions regarding Internet research. On the other hand, in Europe - perhaps most notably, in Scandinavia - apparently stricter guidelines for human subjects research and data privacy exist than can be found in the U.S. At the same time, however - at least in Sweden, according to one of our committee members - there is nothing equivalent to the U.S. university IRB board. Rather, there are national committees with responsibility for ethical oversight - but these committees do not seem to take an active oversight role: rather, they are consulted when a researcher is in doubt. The upshot seems to be: Internet researchers in the U.S. are more directly confronted with the need to justify their research as ethically sound before an IRB board (or its equivalent) than colleagues elsewhere. And while the relevant law and ethical codes may be stricter elsewhere - the very lack of such codes in the U.S. may, paradoxically, issue in relatively stricter limitations on U.S. researchers? This is clearly a crude and limited picture: here's where we would like to enlist your help. We would appreciate not only any general tips and discussion that researchers may be able to provide the committee - e.g., pointers to ethical guidelines and law that we may have missed (please review our website resources - <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/aoir/ethics> and our preliminary report - <aoir.org/reports/ethics.html> to see what we have collected over the psat year), especially outside the U.S. context; descriptions of whatever ethical regulation may exist and how the process works, etc. We would also like to request accounts of specific experiences (in effect, specific case studies) - e.g., examples of where Internet research was either approved or disapproved on ethical or legal grounds, with some description of how these decisions were made, by what persons, institutions, committees, etc. We're hoping that this sort of information from aoir will give us a better picture of "what's going on" not just in the U.S. but around the world regarding oversight of Internet research - specifically as involving the application of particular ethical guidelines and legal requirements - as currently experienced by researchers. People are welcome to share their experiences with the general aoir list if they feel comfortable doing so. Any material sent to me - for distribution to the committee - will be treated in strictest confidence. That means: we will not refer to the material beyond the bounds of the committee without (a) acquiring permission from the author(s) to do so, (b) protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the authors as desired - e.g., by keeping material anonymous, using pseudonyms and other means of disguising sensitive information, etc. Of course, if individuals _want_ to be treated as authors making a contribution, perhaps to be published as part of our reports, web documents, etc., with appropriate attribution - we will happily do so as well. But please make your preference - i.e., for confidentiality or publicity - clear. On behalf of the ethics working committee - thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide. Charles Ess Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230 Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435 Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/ "...to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on this earth which the meanest and lowest of human beings cannot have." -- Gandhi