Panel on Research Ethics (PRE)

The Panel on Research Ethics (PRE) — formally the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics — is the body Canada’s three federal research funding agencies (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), collectively “the Agencies”) created jointly in 2001 to develop, interpret, and steward the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2) on their behalf. PRE is the governing/stewarding body behind the policy document; it is a distinct entity from TCPS2 itself, and from the Research Ethics Boards (REBs) that apply TCPS2 to individual studies at Canadian institutions.

What PRE does

PRE’s mandate is to promote the ethical conduct of research involving humans on behalf of CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC. In practice this means PRE:

• Drafts and periodically revises TCPS2 — the 1998 original, the substantially rewritten TCPS 2 (2010), and the subsequent 2014, 2018, and 2022 updates were each produced through this process, following public consultation.
• Issues interpretive guidance clarifying how TCPS2’s articles apply to specific situations REBs and researchers encounter.
• Provides the Agencies with independent advice on emerging issues in human-research ethics.
• Maintains educational resources, most notably TCPS 2: CORE, the free online tutorial on TCPS2’s requirements that many Canadian institutions require researchers and REB members to complete before submitting or reviewing a protocol.

PRE is supported operationally by the Secretariat on Research Ethics, which provides the staff and administrative capacity behind PRE’s policy-development and outreach work.

What PRE does not do

PRE does not review, approve, or reject individual research protocols. That function belongs entirely to institutional REBs, which are constituted and operate at each Tri-Agency-eligible university, college, or research hospital under the requirements TCPS2 sets out. A researcher does not submit a study to PRE for ethics approval — they submit it to their institution’s REB, which applies the policy PRE stewards. PRE’s role sits one level up: it writes and interprets the rulebook; REBs apply the rulebook to specific studies. This is the same kind of governing-body-versus-policy-document distinction as, for example, the European Network of Research Integrity Offices (ENRIO) relative to the code of conduct it helps steward at the European level — a coordinating/governing body is not the same entity as the document it maintains or the local review body applying it.

Composition

PRE is composed of members drawn from across Canada representing a range of expertise relevant to human-research ethics, including research involving Indigenous peoples, ethics review practice, research administration, the health, natural, and social sciences, humanities and engineering research, law, and a lay/public perspective.

Example

When a Canadian university revises its institutional research-ethics policy manual to reflect the 2022 update to TCPS2, the source of that update is PRE, not the university itself and not the individual REB — PRE drafted and issued the revised Policy; the university adopts it as binding institutional policy; the REB then applies the revised articles when reviewing new and ongoing protocols.

Counter-example

A researcher whose protocol is flagged for additional consent-language revisions during REB review is dealing with their institution’s REB applying TCPS2, not with PRE directly — PRE does not correspond with individual researchers about specific studies or sit on institutional review committees.