The Institutional Review Board at DTU Compute is responsible for the evaluation of ethical considerations for projects involving collection of any human data (i.e. through experiments), which do not fall within the area of competence and responsibility of the regional health sciences ethics committees. This IRB is responsible for ensuring rights and well-being of participants, as well as good practice in data management and transparency of data, following guidelines in line with the Declaration of Helsinki. This will be ensured through evaluation of project proposals sent to the IRB; however, once approved, the responsibility lies with the applicants, as the IRB will not be responsible for guaranteeing that the applicants follow up on the regulations proposed in the report.
IRB approval should ideally be applied for prior to data collection. The committee will also grant approval for special cases where data collection has commenced or finished, if there are only minor ethical concerns, or where significant changes to the proposal are not required. (If data collection has commenced, this must be stated in the application).
The IRB will not review the scientific quality of the proposals. Also, it will not provide GDPR approval. It will, however, evaluate whether additional data protection approval is needed (in cases of partially anonymized or non-anonymized data) or not.
The IRB will primarily deal with projects of an experimental nature, with the goal of being published. It can also review student projects that require collection of data from human participants.
The bylaws for the IRB as approved by the head of department February 24, 2021.
Information regarding protocol, how to submit an application, etc. is available here.
