Loren Terveen

I would argue that the IRB, as a legal requirement, should be considered a minimum rather than a gold standard by the people in the broader research community who judge the work. By that I mean program committees, not colleagues.

This is an important point. This has been the topic of intense discussion in the ACM SIGCHI community for a number of years. Should PCs 'override' standard ethical reviews? Under what circumstances? There are strong opinions on this! @asbruckman might have thoughts...

The key challenge for program committees is that standards for human subjects regulation vary by country. It's unreasonable to apply the US standard to everyone. 1/

There are some countries whose human subjects regulatory frameworks are inadequate/non-existent. Researchers from those countries won't have undergone IRB review because in many places are no IRBs or anything like it. 2/

So a question as simple as "did this undergo IRB review?" is fraught with western imperialism.... No, there's no IRB where that researcher is from. Now what? 3/

One possible solution is to create an *ACM standard* and say researchers hoping to publish in ACM venues must abide by the ACM standard (and all their local rules as well). The problem is, writing and maintaining such a standard is a huuuuge undertaking. 4/

I saw a proposal recently that suggested we say "abide by the ACM code of conduct and all local human subjects rules." But the ACM code of conduct isn't a human subjects policy and doesn't give clear guidance, and also is *aspirational*, setting a high bar. 5/