The incentive for the IRB is to be as thorough and put up as many obstacles as possible. Both from a blame deflection standpoint and a bureaucratic empire building standpoint.
I'm not aware of any force pushing in the other direction to make the scrutiny proportional to the risk.
If this is true - and I'm just some programmer reading stuff on the web who knows little of real life IRBs - the end result is a system that overproduces IRB red tape and underproduces science.
Of course, complaining about a system is easy. Figuring out a better system is not.
> I'm not aware of any force pushing in the other direction to make the scrutiny proportional to the risk.
Each research institution has its own IRB, which I expect is composed by faculty/researchers. The have an incentive not to block their own institution from producing any research output whatsoever.
The incentive for the IRB is to be as thorough and put up as many obstacles as possible. Both from a blame deflection standpoint and a bureaucratic empire building standpoint.
I'm not aware of any force pushing in the other direction to make the scrutiny proportional to the risk.
If this is true - and I'm just some programmer reading stuff on the web who knows little of real life IRBs - the end result is a system that overproduces IRB red tape and underproduces science.
Of course, complaining about a system is easy. Figuring out a better system is not.