Supporting Ethical Web Research: A New Research Ethics Review

Research ethics is an important and timely topic. In academia, federally regulated Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) protect participants of human subjects research, and offer researchers a mechanism to assess the ethical implications of their work. Industry research labs are not subject to the same requirements, and may lack processes for research ethics review. We describe the creation of a new ethics framework and a research ethics submission system (RESS) within Microsoft Research (MSR). This RESS is customized to the needs of web researchers. We describe our iterative development process, including our assessment of the current state of web research, developing a framework of methods based on a survey of 358 research papers; build and evaluate our system with 14 users to identify the benefits and pitfalls of full deployment; evaluate how our system matches with existing federal regulations; and, suggest next steps for supporting ethical web research.