Updating the Canadian Tri-Council policy statement
In Canada, the leading research ethics policy is the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS), first implemented in 1998 and updated most recently in 2005. The policy is currently undergoing a major redrafting, involving cross country consultations on a 2nd Edition draft.
Of interest for this blog, are the changes being made to the part of the policy dealing with COI. In the current version of the TCPS, COI is dealt with rather briefly in Section 4, giving some attention to issues facing researchers, but very little regarding COI for institutions or research ethics boards. The new draft addresses COI in much more detail in Chapter 7, with clearer definitions of individual and institutional COI, examples and recommendations. This chapter still needs some polishing and clarification (the draft is open for revisions until the end of June), but I think constitutes a major improvement over the 1st edition of the TCPS.
