By Lea Laursen Pasgaard, AAU Communication. Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication. Photo: Shutterstock

Involvement of physical participants, artificial intelligence and technologies that may be dangerous to humans, animals or the environment. Many types of research activities can raise ethical questions, and an increasing number of researchers are faced with demands for ethical approvals. This is one of the reasons the AAU Research Ethics Committee at Aalborg University (AAU) has initiated a new model for ethical approval of research activities.

As of 1 May 2023, all research activities at AAU that raise ethical questions and begin after 1 May 2023 are required to obtain ethical approval. And the approval must be in place before the research activity begins.

- Finally, we must also note that the media are increasingly asking critical questions about research and its methods. An ethical approval of research can be a safeguard against unwanted public attention in several ways, he adds.

Risk assessment based on digital screening model

The AAU Research Ethics Committee was established at the end of 2020, and since then has been developing the model for ethical approval of research at AAU. The result is a model based on the English and Dutch model with a fast and a slow track system for approving research ethical applications based on risk assessments. The committee has developed a digital screening model to help AAU researchers assess whether their research requires ethical approval. The researcher answers a short series of questions and then receives a risk assessment of the research activity in question.

- We have chosen a digital solution to make the process easier for researchers. Once you answer the initial questions, you receive an assessment of whether your research activity requires ethical approval. If it does, you will automatically be directed to the formal review process where further action depends on whether the activities are 'low risk' or 'high risk', Thomas Ploug explains.

The committee estimates that the research activities in 90-95 percent of the cases will be low-risk projects that are processed on an ongoing basis and are expected to have a case processing time of 10 working days. In such cases, the chair of the committee decides on the ethical approval in conjunction with the committee member representing the faculty that is home to the research activity. Applications for high-risk activities are processed by the entire AAU Research Ethics Committee at 10 annually scheduled meetings.   

The requirement for ethical approval applies to all researchers employed at AAU. However, the health and health data science research activities that require approval by the national or regional research ethics committees are exempt from the requirement for ethical approval by the AAU Research Ethics Committee. 

Committee chair: Try out the tool

The new screening test is already available on the AAU website: Screening test. Thomas Ploug hopes that AAU researchers can see the value in the new tool and encourages all researchers at AAU to try it out:

- Much of the research at AAU is unproblematic in terms of research ethics and therefore does not need to be approved. The individual researcher may know when it is relevant, but the easiest and safest procedure for establishing this – formally – is to take this little screening test, says Thomas Ploug.

Further information can be found under the FAQ on the committee's website: Research ethics at AAU.

Questions can also be directed to the committee's secretariat (etik@adm.aau.dk) or committee chair Thomas Ploug (ploug@ikp.aau.dk).