Research Ethics Boards Editing and Proofreading Services

A committee returns an application with fourteen points. The researcher reads them, cannot tell which are conditions of approval and which are the committee thinking aloud, resubmits addressing all fourteen at length, and the second review takes another month. The delay was not caused by the ethical issues. It was caused by a letter that did not distinguish between what must change and what somebody on the committee would prefer.

We edit what research ethics committees and boards produce — decision and conditions letters to researchers, requests for clarification and their wording, application forms and their guidance notes, guidance on consent, capacity and vulnerable participants, protocol amendment and adverse event procedures, standard operating procedures and terms of reference, reviewer and member guidance, training material for researchers, annual and final report requirements, and appeals and reconsideration procedures. Our editors work on the letter that determines how long approval takes.

The conditions letter is where a committee either resolves an application or extends it, and its failure is a numbered list of undifferentiated comments. A researcher cannot act efficiently on a letter that mixes requirements, recommendations and observations. We work through these so the letter separates three categories explicitly — conditions that must be met before approval, matters the committee asks the researcher to consider and may decline with a reason, and observations requiring no response — since this single distinction removes most of the second round; so each condition states what would satisfy it rather than what is wrong, because "the consent form is inadequate" produces a guess and "add the sentence about data retention required by policy 4.2, and reduce the reading age of paragraph three" produces a compliant form; so any condition resting on a policy or regulation names it, given that a researcher who can read the source usually complies without argument; so the committee's reasoning is given for anything a researcher is likely to resist, as unexplained requirements are the ones that come back as appeals; so the route for disagreement is stated, including who to contact and whether a meeting is possible, since the alternative is a resubmission that argues rather than complies; so the delegated or chair's-action route is named for minor conditions, because sending a corrected consent form back to a full committee costs a month; and so the letter says what is already fine. Letters written this way approve good research faster.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applications, committee correspondence and researcher information. We are editors rather than ethicists or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on ethical judgements, conditions or approvals. What we can do is make the letter distinguish requirements from preferences.