[Air-L] IRB and blogs

[Kevin Guidry]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Brabham, Daren C
<dbrabham at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>
> The act of publication is to make public a set of ideas, and at that point it becomes an
> artifact--a text--game for analysis without the concern of human subject research ethics
> (in my opinion). Again, if the authors attempt to password-protect their work, that's an
> IRB-worthy issue, but otherwise, even if it's about a "personal matter," the act of
> publication is a public thing...thus no IRB needed.

I apologize if I can not articulate this very well but the statements
above bother me quite a bit.  I think one of the things that bothers
me most is the assumption that all publication is equal and that
privacy is binary when those are both very problematic (and
demonstrably false) assumptions, particularly the privacy one.
Jeremy's reminder about those with limited mental capacity or agency
gets at one potential source of this unease by reminding us of the
need to contextualize this discussion but there is a whole lot more
context that is necessary.

It would also be good if we could be more careful to disambiguate
discussions and decisions about the politics and procedures of IRB
approval from broader and more nuanced ethical issues and concerns.
I'm all for telling IRB that some studies or decisions are not theirs
to make or control but let's please be careful not to imply that we
can toss out ethical concerns because we're "working with text" or
"not working with people."  I don't think anyone here intends that or
has said that but it's an easy conclusion to reach and something to be
avoided with great caution, IMHO.


Kevin