UNB Research

Institutional support for research takes many forms—grant and partnership facilitation are more prominent, while others can be deceptively invisible.

Effective research policies and procedures are critical but less visible supports, ensuring both that necessary guardrails are in place and that researchers are provided with good guidance for their activities.

Having policies that match current best practices is also a way that we can meet our commitments to our communities and our world, setting expectations that ensure research is carried out in ways that respect the people, animals, and environment we work with, and that it is academically rigorous.

Updating two of these key policies—UNB’s Policy on Research Involving Humans and its Policy on Animal Care and Use—has been a priority focus for Robyn Nicholson, Strategic Projects Manager in the Office of the Vice President Research.

While policy updates benefit many projects and people, this broad applicability also means that the work of updating these policies doesn’t factor into individual project grants. Funding from the Government of Canada’s Research Support Fund helps ensure that this type of work can be properly undertaken by funding positions like Nicholson’s.

Nicholson was hired as strategic projects manager almost two years ago to support a variety of special projects that support UNB’s research enterprise. Certain policies were quickly identified as high priority, and Nicholson set to work.

“Policy updates are projects in and of themselves, and can be quite complex ones at that,” said Nicholson. “Seeing policies as strategic projects also allows for a higher-level, longer-horizon view of the work and goals of the research enterprise across the full institution and how policy fits into it.”

While the fundamental principles and goals of research ethics policies for work with humans and with animals remain relatively consistent, the conversation surrounding how these principles are defined and what best practices look like evolve over time—just as in research, new knowledge leads us to reflect and improve how we do things.

For human research ethics, some of the key changes integrate Indigenous research, including OCAP certification requirements, and research involving equity-deserving groups. References to other UNB and tri-agency policies have also been added.

For the animal use and care policy, much of the updated guidance comes from the Canadian Council on Animal Care, a federally funded organisation mandated to advance practices for the ethical care and use of animals in science.

Additional revisions came from a growing shift toward standardizing policy and practice across all research spaces and both of UNB’s campuses.