POLICY
Double duty On 22 September, a committee from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, DC, issued a report calling for the elimination of duplicate regulations for federally funded university experiments. “Research is increasingly collaborative in nature, and many projects involve multiple [principal investigators] collecting data at different institutions. Current regulations, for example, require that the institutional review board for each institution involved in a study review and approve the same research protocol,” Harriet Rabb, the vice president and general counsel for the Rockefeller University and vice-chair of the committee, told Nature Medicine. Instead, the committee that approval by a single institutional review board should suffice, avoiding the need for multiple boards to approve the same domestic projects. It also proposes that the US Congress create a Research Policy Board, connected to both the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and research centers, to work with the Office of Budget and Management. The effort would aim to streamline these regulations so that researchers could maximize the time that they spend on research rather than bureaucracy.
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