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The Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services (AHRECS) team brings extensive experience and expertise to support your research ethics needs. We have collaborated with research ethics committees, regulatory bodies, and professional organisations across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, ensuring compliance with international standards, including US OHRPP and ORI requirements.
Our team combines a deep theoretical understanding with a practical knowledge of regulatory frameworks. With over 20 years of collective experience, our senior consultants excel in implementing best practices in research ethics training, systems, and reforms. By partnering with AHRECS, you gain access to trusted advisors who can help you navigate complex requirements, enhance your systems, and ensure ethical excellence in your research practices.
Latest blog entries
A Note on the Importance of Sensitising the Novice Researcher to the Realities of Ethics in Practice
Discussions of research ethics have begun to centre increasingly on how research guidelines translate into ethical practice during the research process. In the paper which prompted the invitation to contribute to this blog (McEvoy, Enright & MacPhail, 2015), my experiences as a novice researcher conducting focus group interviews with a group of young people are…
We would all benefit from more research integrity research
Paul M Taylor1 and Daniel P Barr2 1Director, Research Integrity, Governance and Systems Research and Innovation, RMIT University (paul.taylor@rmit.edu.au) 2Acting Director, Office for Research Ethics and Integrity Research, Innovation and Commercialisation, The University of Melbourne (dpbarr@unimelb.edu.au) We need more research into research integrity, research misconduct and peer review. This is not a controversial statement, and…
Comparing research integrity responses in Australia and The Netherlands
Last year, I was invited by Tracey Bretag to contribute a chapter to the Handbook of Academic Integrity. The invite was a little unusual – find another author and work with him or her to compare how research integrity has been dealt with in your two jurisdictions. It could have gone horribly wrong. It didn’t,…
Reflections on case: ‘Racist bus drivers project’
All views expressed in this post are my own and not of my employer, the national committees which I have served on, nor my consultancy clients The case relates to action taken by University of Queensland against Prof. Paul Frijters because of his alleged conduct of a project without appropriate ethical clearance. The project related to…
When is research not research?
Most institutions have processes for differentiating between Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement (QA/QI) activities and those that can be considered to be research. Unfortunately, much of the debate about which is which has been driven by regulatory needs, as a categorization of QA/QI leads to a project not requiring ethics committee review, a preference for many where…
Technology research in sensitive settings: A workshop on ethical encounters in HCI
In May this year, a group of researchers gathered in San Jose, California, to attend a workshop on “Ethical Encounters in HCI”. HCI is human-computer interaction, an interdisciplinary field of research that covers a broad spectrum of activities, ranging from ethnographic research that aims to understand people to inform design, to lab-based studies that aim…
Applying Place to Research Ethics and Cultural Competence Training
In the 1990s, I worked with many community groups and Native American/African-American communities on the difficult challenges of understanding environmental health risks from low-level radiation contamination. These place-based communities and cultural groups were downwind from nuclear weapons production facilities which had massive deliberate and accidental releases of radiation since their operations began during and after…
Abuse of prisoners in the United States
Mike Adorjan and Rose Ricciardelli’s edited collection, Engaging with Ethics in International Criminological Research, was recently published by Routledge. Of course, the book examines the likely suspects – ethical practices in relation to studies of policing, imprisonment and vulnerable populations. However, there are more unusual pieces on illuminating the Dark Net, carceral tours, and working…
We don’t need a definition of research misconduct
Responsibilities for ensuring the integrity of the research record rests with a number of players – funding agencies, governments, publishers, journal editors, institutions who conduct research and the researchers themselves. Our responsibilities for providing research that is honest and trustworthy are extant at the very beginning of a research project and ever present thereafter. If…
Making Indigenous research ethics a compulsory facet of supervisor development and student training
There is an increasing trend in Australian universities to provide professional development for supervisors of higher degree research (HDR) students (Whisker & Kiley, 2014). Concurrently there is also a move toward more structured research development programs for HDR candidates (McGagh et.al., 2016). Education in Indigenous research ethics for both these groups is essential if we…
Ethical use of visual social media content in research publications
At a research ethics workshop at the 2015 CSCW conference (Fiesler et al., 2015), researchers in our community respectfully disagreed about using public social media data for research without the consent of those who had posted the material. Some argued that researchers had no obligation to gain consent from each person whose data appeared in…
Review of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research
The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research 2007 (the Code) is Australia’s premier research standard. It was developed by the government agencies that fund the majority of research in Australia, namely the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council, in collaboration with the peak body representing Australian universities…
‘Except as required by law’: Australian researchers’ legal rights and obligations regarding participant confidentiality
Anna Olsen, Research School of Population Health, ANU Julie Mooney-Somers, Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, University of Sydney *Neither of us are lawyers and, as such, our interpretations are as social scientists and HREC members. Interested lawyers and legal scholars are encouraged to contribute! Researchers’ promises of confidentiality are often easily…
Intuitive Research Ethics Training for Novices
The pedagogy of teaching research methods, let alone research ethics, is an under-researched field. In this blog entry, two postgraduate students reflect on their classroom experience where our lecturer engaged his students in a qualitative research ethics course, using two novice ethnographers’ candid empirical studies as the basis for discussion. While it is more usual…
Ethical Self-Assessment: Excellence in Reflexivity or Corporatisation Gone Mad?
Research ethics and integrity have always been at the forefront of my work, not only because the issues which I explore (self-injury, disability, gender and sexuality) are personal, sensitive and often stigmatised topics, but also because as a disabled, feminist researcher I have first-hand experience of the ways in which power, inequality and appropriation are…
Research Ethics in the Philippines: a personal journey
My recall of the earliest encounter I had with research ethics is when, as a newly appointed faculty member of the department of obstetrics and gynecology of the College of Medicine (CM) of the University of the Philippines (UP) and concurrent attending at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), I rushed to the office of the…
Cracking the Code: Is the Revised Australian Code likely to ensure Responsible Conduct of Research?
The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research is presently under review. Issued jointly in 2007 by the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council and Universities Australia, the current code is a 41-page document divided into two parts. Part A, comprising some 22 pages, sets out the responsibilities of institutions…
iDARE: [innovation.design.arts.research.ethics]
I dare you? iDARE involves a team of designers and visual and performing artists and theorists from across Australia who have asked the question: How do we prepare artists for real world practice where there are no ethics committees to guide them and where and they are responsible for developing their own ethical framework in…
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