global and unlimited. The ethical commitment of e-journal administrators to the protection of patients needs to be heightened and monitored. Some examples of current notices for authors which attempt to deal with this problem are given in Appendix B. 3.6 Psychoanalytic research Research involving human subjects, as it is called in the social science and humanities research community, gives rise to a need for protection of confidentiality. Like other research funding bodies, the IPA has procedures in place for protecting the confidentiality of research subjects. The IPA’s Research Committee, the body within the IPA that provides research funding, requires that every applicant for a research grant involving human subjects (normally, analysands) have obtained ethical approval for the proposed research before receiving any funding from the IPA. The approval must be obtained from what the Research Committee calls an Institutional Review Board (IRB), also known (e.g. in North America) as an Ethics Committee or Research Ethics Committee. Every agency that funds research using human subjects, including every research university in the industrialized world, requires approval by an IRB or has an equivalent requirement in place. As a further safeguard, the IPA requires also that all grant-holders work through a research institution. Approval by an IRB invariably requires that no subjects be identified by name or other identifying feature in the research, but only by an arbitrary number. The list connecting numbers to names and contact information is then held under tight restrictions, and usually only the principal investigator or research administrator has access to it. IRBs also require that data be reported only in aggregated form whenever possible. Psychoanalytic research on human subjects takes broadly two forms: multi-subject research, in which individual results are aggregated and no individual information is presented; and studies of either a single case or a small number of cases involving the presentation of information about individuals. For multi-subject research, approval by a reputable IRB is widely considered to be an appropriate form of research ethics clearance and for such research, the requirement of IRB clearance is, in our view, sufficient. For studies of individual cases or a small number of cases involving presentation of information about individuals, in our view there should be a further requirement. Such research proposals should further be required to have in place the protections of confidentiality in the use of clinical material identified in sub-sections 3.2 to 3.5, above. We recommend that the Research Committee be asked to add to their application process a requirement that applicants have demonstrated that these protections will be in place.
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