(THE COLLEGE FIX) – Nature Human Behaviour is standing behind a recent controversial and heavily criticized decision to update editorial and ethics guidelines to avoid publishing research that may cause indirect harm “to human population groups.”
The guidelines were written by multiple editors from multiple journals within the Nature Portfolio and presented as a reasonable progression of “[w]ell-established ethics frameworks” and long-observed precedents that aim to reduce potential harms to human research participants.
“Harms can arise as a direct result of the conduct of research – for instance, injury to human participants in the course of participating in a research project,” the authors wrote.
