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UD3-Lab / mintEMU

mintEMU - The Legacy of the European Postgraduate Master in Urbanism at TU Delft: A Text Mining Approach
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contact HREC, for confirmation that we are not using human subjects #32

Closed alwil closed 1 year ago

alwil commented 1 year ago

@cforgaci I have drafter the email to HREC and sent it via email.

Pasting here to keep track on the steps made:

Dear Human Research Ethics Committee,

I would like to ask your advice on whether the project I am working on should be considered a project on Human Research Subjects.

Together with Dr. Claudiu Forgaci ( in CC), we are working on text analysis of Master theses of a certain Master Program offered at TU Delft. Here are some facts about the project and actions that we have taken so far with regards to data management:

  • The aim of the project is to analyze the body of text of the theses.
  • We have acquired most of the data by downloading the theses’ PDF files from the TU Delft education repository. Some of the PDFs have been sent to us via email directly by the authors. Our plan is to convert them to machine-readable format, anonymize them (i.e. remove personal information about the authors, such as name or email address) and publish them in the 4TUResearchData repository
  • In effort to respect data privacy and copyrights of the authors, we have consulted the TU Delft Library Copyright Expert, Paschalis Kontanas. He recommended us seeking an explicit consent from the authors of the theses to use it in the (published) research and republish the data. We have contacted the authors and aim to use only the theses of those from whom we have received consent.
  • We have created a draft DMP (attached) through DMPonline software. In one of her comments, the BK data steward, Diana Popa, suggested that we contacted HREC to verify whether the project that we want to conduct involves human research subjects.

We are not sure if the described project involves human subjects. We thought it doesn’t but we would like to verify it definitively. Could you have a look at the presented materials and let us know whether we should go ahead with the project of should we go through the HREC approval procedure?

Many thanks in advance!

cforgaci commented 1 year ago

👍 Thanks, this looks good! Responded via email as well.

alwil commented 1 year ago

Interesting question. If all of these publications are in the public domain then it looks like bibliometric study/text analysis, and I > would suggest that you contact Alastair Dunning in the Library to find out who in his team you should discuss this with in terms > of bibliometric practices. If the theses are not in the public domain then I would also suggest consulting the privacy team and > archiving (again Alastair can advise who to contact on the latter). I will also discuss with the Chair of the HREC, (Udo Pesch, copied here) and let you know if we have any further advice.