After 10 years, COBE Lab’s Human Subjects Committee (HSC) will cease to exist on October 24, instead merging into Aarhus University’s Research Ethics Committee (AUREC). The occasion for this merger is the fact that the BSS subcommittee of AUREC is opening four new work teams consisting of researchers with expertise in different research methods. Two of these teams will review all survey studies at BSS, one will review qualitative studies, and finally one will review all laboratory studies and all studies associated with COBE Lab, including those coming from outside BSS.

When COBE’s HSC was set up in 2013, there was no way to get ethical approval for studies that were not health-related and hence not eligible to be reviewed by the Regional Committee on Health Research Ethics. The purpose of the HSC was to ensure that the research that took place in COBE Lab followed national and international ethical guidelines for responsible research using human subjects. The university subsequently launched AUREC in 2019 as their own Institutional Review Board, which has meant that a lot of researchers have sought ethical approval from both COBE Lab’s HSC and AUREC. This has been an unnecessarily inefficient system, and for this reason the two are now merging.

The laboratory work team will bear some continuity with COBE’s HSC. The head of our HSC, Julia Nafziger from the Department of Economics, will constitute one third of the new work team. She will be joined by Lene Aarøe from the Department of Political Science and Peter Krøjgaard from the Department of Psychology. COBE’s Lab Manager, Marc Hye-Knudsen, will handle administratives support for the work team like he has previously done as the lab representative for the HSC.

What does this mean for you as a researcher?

From October 24, the HSC will no longer exist and can no longer issue responses to submitted studies. Please do not send in any new studies to the HSC after October 15. Any new studies to be run at COBE Lab from this moment onwards should instead submit their project to be ethically reviewed by AUREC here.This is also where researchers from departments outside of BSS (e.g., cognitive science) should send their studies to be reviewed from now on when they want to use COBE’s facilities and/or participant pool. AUREC will follow the same schedule as previously, with 8 rounds of review per year. The next application deadline for AUREC is 25 October, and the final decision (approval or rejection) will typically be made for each application approximately 3-4 weeks after each application deadline.

If this transition creates problems for a study of yours, you can contact Marc at cobelab@au.dk, and we will work towards finding a solution that works for your project.

A note of thanks

We would like to thank the Human Subjects Committee for the invaluable work they have done, voluntarily devoting their time and energy to ensuring that the studies we have run at the lab have been ethically defensible. Your efforts have been greatly appreciated, and your meticulousness and fast turn-around time has been unprecedented. In particular, we would like to thank the current core members of the HSC: Julia Nafziger, Sonja Perkovic, Anne Odile Peschel, Fabio Trecca, and Cordula Vesper. Beyond this, we would like to thank all previous members of the HSC through the years.

See you at the lab!
Dan and Marc, lab management