Get certified to work with human subjects

This page is meant to help researchers get IRB info and certification needed to run studies with human subjects.

Take the CITI online course. Instructions for Brown students are here: http://www.brown.edu/research/about-brown-research/policies/instructions-accessing-basic-citi-program. Down the road, you should get an email when your CITI training expires. At that point, you will need to follow these instructions and complete the training again.
Sign up for and complete Brown's BEARCORE training when it is offered next. This training program is a half-day course at Brown that fulfills the NSF requirements for ethics training. This training is required by the NSF for anyone receiving NSF grant or fellowship funding; the CS department recently made this a requirement for PhD students. For info and a schedule, check here: http://www.brown.edu/research/compliance-education-training/education-training/bearcore/bearcore.

Are you doing "human subjects research"? This can include activities like running surveys or doing secondary data analysis. If you are not sure, there is a lot of general info at the Research Protections Office. Cornell's IRB office has a nifty decision-tree chart to help students there (disclaimer: IRB policies at Brown and Cornell are not necessarily the same).
If you are, make sure you have an approved IRB protocol for your experiment. The VRL has a protocol for general visualization experiments that is renewed annually. An up-to-date consent form for that protocol lives on the CS filesystem at: /pro/graphics/proposals/brown/irb/ConsentForm.pdf. Read through it before starting your study to make sure there are no new risks. David could probably tell you whether your study is too different from what is already approved. If so, your study might require the IRB to approve a new protocol or an amendment to an existing one.
Remember to get informed consent with your IRB-approved form/script before running each participant.

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