Slide 21
Slide 21 text
Ethical review?
Mostly nope.
• Out of 62 projects, only 16 documented
an ethics review.
• US-based studies? Of 46 projects, 11
passed IRB review. 4 were declared exempt.
• That leaves 31 likely unreviewed.
One thing I found is that tons of this stu
ff
looks to be getting no ethical review whatever. Out of sixty-two projects, only sixteen documented that they
had. In the United States, out of forty-six projects, eleven passed IRB, four were declared exempt, and the remaining thirty-one? Nothing they mentioned.
Which, apparently, not mentioning IRB review for projects that got it is a thing at some LIS journals? I can’t
fi
gure out why and I don’t think it’s very ethics-
minded, but people I trust tell me it’s so. L-P-C, y’all might want to say something about this in your publishing ethics materials?
And some of you are yelling at me in your heads right now that so-called quality-assurance or quality-control projects, assessment projects, may not have
to be ethics-reviewed. Sometimes IRBs
fl
at-out refuse to review them, even. And yeah, I know that. I’ve got another thing I’m writing where I talk about
that, because I think that’s part of the problem here. Assessment practices absolutely can do harm, and both in librarianship and the academy more
generally, we’re not really reckoning with that.
But it’s worth mentioning that this lack of ethics reviewing puts y’all in a bad spot, as publishers. You are the
fi
nal frontier for ethics, you can get called out
for an author’s bad ethics at any time, and you have to make these ethical calls after all the work’s been done, and quite possibly a lot of the harm to
patrons. I’m just saying, I don’t envy y’all here.