Yes! We always welcome Minervans contacting us if they think maybe they should. Even if the information is easily available on this website, we are happy to direct you to it instead of you needing to search around yourself. Our email address is hsr@minerva.edu

Yes! We always welcome Minervans contacting us even when they are not required to--we want to support Minervans thinking through #ethicalconsiderations and #professionalism whenever doing human subjects research, even outside of Minerva. Our email address is hsr@minerva.edu

Actually, this one is not something the IRB does! We are focused on the ethics of interacting with people and their data for research, but designing your research is beyond the scope of what we do. You might try contacting a relevant professor, or the Minerva Psychology Labs. However, if you really don't know who to ask, you can email us for a suggestion of who can be helpful.

Currently, Minervans can do Human Subjects Research (supervised by the MU IRB) in three locations:

• In person in the United States
• Online via platforms that are "based" in the United States (restrictions apply to this--the general idea is that you do not need to take big steps to restrict online participants to only the US, but you can not intentionally recruit participants outside of the United States)
• Minervans in any location

Thus, the following would all be possible to get approved by the MU IRB: collecting survey data at a public park in New York City, posting a study on mturk.com for participants to do and not restricting participation to the USA but also not intentionally recruiting outside the USA or planning cross-cultural comparisons, conducting an experiment with Minerva students in rotation cities.

Likewise, the following would NOT be possible to get approved by the MU IRB yet (but hopefully will be in the future): collecting survey data at a public park in Berlin, posting a study on mturk.com for participants to do and recruiting internationally for cross-cultural comparisons.

This policy reflects the fact that IRBs typically supervise research only in the country in which they are located, and do not assume the cultural competence to supervise #ethicalconsiderations and #professionalism in other contexts. Relatedly, IRBs always contain a "community member" who is not otherwise affiliate with the university (and our "community member" is from the United States). Thus, to do research outside of an institution's "home" country, researchers usually must receive review and approval from both their home IRB and a relevant authority in the other country (and it is the researcher's responsibility to find an authority willing to do this).

However, the MU IRB intends to expand its competence over time to all Minerva rotation countries. This will include adding members and/or consultants to our IRB from rotation countries and developing additional training. For example, if in the future we are able to supervise research in Seoul, this will be after we have at least one member/consultant on the IRB from South Korea, and have developed training for Minervans to do to know about conducting HSR in South Korea. Once this is in place for a rotation country, Minervans could do research there (e.g., collecting survey data at a public park in Berlin) by working only with the MU IRB and not needing to consult with a local authority as well.

There is, of course, a dividing line somewhere, but we lean towards saying that we want to consult with you about your work if it is anywhere near the line. We are eager to work with you to achieve the goals and fulfill the values described in our mission statement on our Who We Are page. We also want you to have a great experience with the process--with it taking as little work and time as possible, the actual value of it being high, and your perceived value of it being high. One of the first Minervans to engage with our brand new IRB spontaneously included the following in a message "Also, just want to say that this process has been great! It has been painless AND forced me to think about the project in more detail. 10/10!" -- we want every Minervan who engages with us to have an experience like that.