Frequently Asked Questions

You cannot start recruitment or data collection until you have received written approval from the relevant Human Research Ethics Panel (HREAP) or Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). Consultations and literature reviews to determine the scope of your project can occur prior to applying for ethics approval.

If your project involves overseas fieldwork, researchers must establish ethics approval before making and confirming travel arrangements.

The UNSW HREAPs and HRECs do not provide retrospective approval for any research conducted without ethics approval or under an expired ethics project.

The HREC and HREA Panels provide approval for up to five years.

The Chief Investigator can apply for an extension before the end date of an approved project.

Human ethics approval is provided for a period of 5 years. If an extension to the approval period is required, researchers can apply for one 12-month extension request following the initial approval period. If the researchers require another extension for the study, they must submit a renewal request:

(a) Extension: An extension for 12 months can be submitted as a modification and will be reviewed by the HREC/HREAP Executive at the weekly meeting.

(b) Renewal: A renewal for a period of 5 years can be submitted as a significant modification and will be reviewed at a monthly meeting by the full HREC/HREAP.

The following requirements apply to any renewal/extension requests:

UNSW has adopted the recommendation of the National Statement to minimise the duplication of ethical review and therefore recognises approvals issued by other NHMRC-registered HRECs and their delegated negligible and low-risk review bodies. This means that UNSW staff and research students do not need to seek ethical review by UNSW HRECs or HREAPs.

Before this type of research can commence, the ethics approval must be registered by the Research Ethics Compliance Support (RECS) Office in the Human Ethics Research Governance process.

Prior to the commencement of the research or participation in an external project UNSW via RECS reserves the right to place conditions on involvement or refuse involvement should approved proposals do not conform to the requirements of the National Statement, other relevant legislation or potentially expose the university to undue risk.

If you have established ethics approval with an NHMRC-registered Australian HREC the submission of a separate application to the UNSW HREC for further approval is not required.

However, UNSW staff and research students are required to register and notify the Research Ethics Compliance Support Human Ethics Team by providing following the external ethics approval process.

UNSW Human Research Ethics approval only covers the use and storage of data while research personnel are a UNSW staff or student. If you are moving institutions human research ethics approval must be established at the institution before the UNSW HREC or HREAP can approve a transfer request. Information on how to process a transfer request can be found on the following webpage:

Establishing Ethical Approval

The review pathway for your human research project is dependent on the level of risk associated with the project. You must select the review pathway specific to the level of risk that your research poses to those that participate in the research. The pathways for review are as follows:

Following the submission of your human research ethics application, the Human Ethics Office will conduct a compliance check to establish whether the submission requirements have been met. Following the compliance check you will receive an email acknowledging receipt of your submission, you will be provided with a HC reference number and if applicable you will be provided with a list of items that you will need to provide before your submission is added to an agenda for review.

Once all items have been addressed your application will be assigned to a meeting agenda and the application along with the other submissions received will be circulated to the Human Research Advisory Panel (HREAP) or Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) for ethical review. HREAP and HREC members are provided with the meeting papers at least 7-10 working days before the meeting during this time members will complete their review of each submission. At the meeting the HREAP or HREC members agree upon the points to be addressed and returned to the research team. At the meeting the HREAP or HREC members will agree upon the outcome of the application, there are four possible outcomes from the first stage of formal review approved, subject to, deferred or rejected.

Following the meeting the Human Ethics team will compile the minutes of the meeting and generate the outcome letters for return to the research team. Once approved by the HREAP Convenor or the HREC Chairperson the outcome letters are released via email with all listed members of the research team copied in on the emails. An overview of the ethical review process following a meeting is described below:

Applications that receive a "subject to" decision upon resubmission can reviewed by the Executive which meets weekly:

* Condition of approval: Conditions can be included to allow the research to commence. Examples of conditions include organisational Letters of Support, Therapeutic Goods Administration Clinical Trial Notification, Site Authorisation, Good Clinical Practice Evidence of Training, Evidence of clinical trial registration or a governance related documentation.

Your application may be approved following the second formal review, or you may be required to make some further changes. If you are required to make revisions or if your application is approved, this will be communicated to you through an outcome notification letter sent via email.

Please respond to the requested information within 1 month from the date of the letter by following the resubmission instructions below. If a response is not received within 1 month from the date of this letter the application will be considered withdrawn and a new application will need to be submitted, unless a request for an extension is received.

  1. Create a cover letter including the following detail:
  1. Provide copies of the revised Application Form and attachments (as applicable)
  1. Submission closing date:

Typically, the most important issues to consider within the Application include:

Activities where Ethical Approval is Not Required

Literature reviews and meta-analyses do not require ethical approval. While meta data per se do not require ethical approval, there are some instances where you will be required to obtain ethical approval prior to accessing the data set. For example, the data custodian may require you to obtain ethical approval to access the data, or ethical approval may be required as part of the data access licencing agreement.

If you are required to establish ethical approval prior to accessing a publically available dataset then you will be required to follow the data extraction process and licensing requirements of the data custodian in order to gain access to the information. In order to gain ethical approval to access publically available datasets, please complete the UNSW Human Ethics Negligible Risk Application Form.

At UNSW, coursework designed for teaching or learning purposes does not require review or approval via the UNSW ethical review process. It is important to note that coursework projects conducted without human research ethics approval cannot be published for a research purpose at any stage.

Faculties and Schools are responsible for implementing a process for assessing coursework projects to ensure that:

Please contact the human research ethics committees and/or panels for further advice of ethical issues if you have any questions.

At UNSW, portraiture is not deemed to constitute human-research and as such does not require human research ethics approval.
Portraiture is defined here as either:

Faculty-specific Image Release Agreements (a.k.a. “Model Release Forms”) should be used to provide portrait participants with information about the portrait you are making, the types of situations their image could be shown in, licencing arrangements and limitations on use by (or sale to) third parties, as well as what will happen to this portrait in the event that they no longer wish their portrait to be available for publication/exhibition/circulation. A signed copy of this agreement should be given to portraiture participants for them to keep in the event that they might wish to withdraw their agreement. Faculty-specific Image Release Agreements can be obtained via your supervisor, course-convenor or Head of School.

If you intend to record statements made by the person to be recorded (also referred to as the model / sitter / subject) in which they contribute their personal insights, experiences and/or opinions – this would be considered an interview and would require UNSW human research ethics approval.

If you intend to conduct a survey, an interview or focus group discussion in order to seek feedback about the portrait for a research purpose, this would also be considered human research and therefore ethical approval would be required.

The UNSW HREAPs and HRECs do not provide retrospective approval for any research conducted without ethics approval or under an expired ethics project. The guidance on whether or not ethical approval is required should be sought by contacting the Human Ethics Team via email humanethics@unsw.edu.au

Recruitment

When research will involve the direct participation of people (e.g. testing, surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation and health or behavioural interventions) the recruitment phase of a project is fundamental to the success of the research. Depending upon the design of a project, recruitment can include such matters as identifying individuals as potential participants, contact between the research team and potential participants, screening or exclusion of some individuals, and preparing to seek consent from the potential participants.

To ensure that your recruitment strategies adhere to the ethical principles of justice and respect you must obtain ethics approval prior to engaging in the recruitment process. Your ethics application should:

  1. Clearly describe the recruitment strategy and the criteria for the selection of potential participants (National Statement, section 3.1.12);
  2. Describe and justify the approach to potential participants (i.e. how will potential participants find out about the possibility of participating, or not, in the research) (National Statement, section 3.1.19); and
  3. Provide reviewers with proposed recruitment materials (e.g. notices, flyers, advertisements, and social media posts) prior to use, including those materials that are developed subsequent to the initial review of the research proposal (National Statement, section 3.1.20).

Stakeholder engagement during the development and design of the recruitment strategy is the only time where prior ethical approval is not required. This would involve engagement with specific groups (generally in person) to discuss the research and, if necessary, to obtain feedback from relevant stakeholders on whether the proposed recruitment strategy is appropriate. It should not involve any of the following:

The purpose of the stakeholder engagement process is to establish whether an organisation may be able to provide access to the intended target population for recruitment purposes. Only after the research proposal has received ethical approval should recruitment commence.

Letters of organisational support confirming their support of the research or their agreement for service provision must be sought by the HREC/HREAP in circumstances where: