title: Secret ethics business?
abstract: In this paper, I question the common assumption that the workings of Human Research Ethics Committees should be treated as confidential. This is actually quite a complex issue, since there are many stages in the ethics approval process, and a number of different stakeholders who might wish to claim access, or restrict access, to different sorts of information. Here I consider just one aspect--whether ethics committee members should be free to reveal in public the details of what occurs in their meetings. My approach is two-fold: first a negative argument that confidentiality does not apply to ethics committee deliberations, and then a positive argument that there is an important public good, namely accountability, to be served by making these deliberations open to the public.
authors.affiliation: Centre for the Study of Health and Society, University of Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Lynn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gillam
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information / Q000941:ethics*; D032802:Committee Membership; D003219:Confidentiality / Q000941:ethics*; D030881:Disclosure / Q000941:ethics*; D028744:Ethics Committees, Research / Q000941:ethics* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006805:Human Experimentation; D006801:Humans; D008402:Mass Media; D012108:Research Personnel; D012941:Social Responsibility