WHO Publishes Standards for Ethics Review

The World Health Organization has published “Standards and Operational Guidance for Ethics Review of Health-Related Research with Human Participants,” a compilation of 10 standards that are applicable to the ethics review of health-related research with human participants. The document delineates general principles and norms that all research ethics systems are expected to follow. They are intended to help ethics committees achieve high-quality performance and to provide a common language that establishes specific outcomes against which achievements can be benchmarked. It can be found at http://www.who.int/ethics/publications/en/.