Oxford Brookes University is committed to maintaining high ethical standards in the research undertaken by staff and students.
Research involving human participants, material or personal data requires full ethics approval. For staff and doctoral students applications are reviewed by one of the two Research Ethics Sub-Committees. All applications are reviewed by either the Cross-Faculty Research Ethics Sub-Committee (CRES) or the Health & Social Care Research Ethics Sub-Committee (HSCRES), providing feedback and formal approval. Applications will be assigned to one of the two Sub-Committees by the Ethics Office based on the nature of the research. Data collection must not begin until full ethics approval has been formally confirmed. Click here to see the timeline of the Ethics Application Process.
The review of research by Undergraduate and Taught Masters students that involves human participants is devolved to the Faculties and is reviewed prior to the commencement of any data collection. The Faculty/Department Research Ethics Officer should be contacted to confirm the correct procedure.
Research data containing personal information is subject to the same legal requirements as any other personal information. There may also be other legal considerations such as intellectual property, copyright or design rights to consider. Participants must be informed of processing activities, how their data will be used and what their rights' are. Should the participant wish to withdraw their data or their consent for use of their personal information at any time this may have implications for the validity of the research. In collaboration with the Information Compliance Team, UREC have produced a GDPR-compliant Privacy Notice. For further information on data management or a data privacy impact assessment, the researcher is advised to seek the advice of the IT Services Information Management team.
Guidelines for seeking informed consent and creating a participant information sheet are also available. Should your research include the use of security sensitive material, please refer to the security sensitive webpage and Guidance Policy.
The relevant research ethics forms and templates are available in the links below for each level of review.
All documents are subject to ongoing review. Please always refer to the website (rather than locally stored versions) for the current versions of guidance documents, procedures and application forms.