At TU Delft, approval for Human Research is provided by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and is mandatory for all research involving data obtained from human research subjects. This includes research involving human participants directly, data collected from the internet and social media, and 3rd party datasets collected from human participants. This is applicable to all researchers, PhD candidates and Master’s students conducting research for their thesis, and occasionally, for the supervisors of Bachelor students who are conducting research these involving human research subjects.
The HREC application should be submitted and approved before potential participants are approached to take part in your study. TU Delft recommends that you submit your application at least 4 weeks before you intend to start recruiting participants for research which is expected to be assessed as Minimal Risk. Projects with higher levels of risk will be considered in the periodic HREC Committee meetings which are held approximately every 6 weeks.
Applications are submitted through the TU Delft’s Lab Servant portal.
A standard HREC application requires three core documents:
The main goal of the HREC checklist is to assess the potential risks that your participants may face as a consequence of participating in your research and to outline what steps you will take to mitigate them. Risks could be linked to direct physical or emotional repercussions of the study, or to being re-identified and linked to specific comments, performance metrics, or views. They may also arise immediately or later on due to a data breach or a change in circumstances
Before submitting your application documents, ensure that the Responsible Researcher has signed and dated the HREC checklist. In the case of student research, the Responsible Researcher is usually the student’s project supervisor.
Fill out the DMP in DMPOnline! (Even though you can download a template), this is easier to work with and preferred by the data stewards.
Can be a useful way to collect informed consent in advance. Be sure to also keep an offline copy of the forms (for example in your project share).
Log in with your TU Delft account at Adobe Documents, and in the top bar find E-Sign. Click that, then find and click Request e-signatures.