We are the FGGA Faculty Ethics committee with 5 current members (May 2025) from the different institutes of the faculty and a secretary. Our secretary is Manon Osseweijer, current chair is Antoaneta Dimitrova, vice chair is Nadine Raaphorst, and Min Cho, Eamon Aloyo, and Andrei Poama are the members. Some of us started when the FGGA committee was created, others joined later. In about one and a half year, the terms of some of the committee will expire and we will look for new colleagues. 

FGGA, as the youngest Leiden faculty, created the Ethics Committee in 2017. We were relative frontrunners to understand the need for this committee. Nowadays each Leiden Faculty has its Ethics Committee, and they coordinate and exchange experiences via a network of secretaries, in which our secretary is a member. 

Ethics committees are becoming a central building block in Leiden university’s knowledge infrastructure, as is happening with other universities worldwide. As scholars, we all work in accordance with codes of ethics and norms of scientific integrity, but these norms evolve with time and with national and international academic debates. For example, many leading academic journals require ethics approvals of the data collection before an article can be considered for publication. This was not the case a decade or two ago. 

Ethics committees are also great reflection platforms. They create the space where researchers have to think about the ethical implications of the questions they ask, the methods they use, the people – be they research participants or partners – they work with, and the way they present their findings to governmental or non-governmental organisations, as well as to the wider public. And we hope that reflective researchers also mean more trust in science and in academic institutions further down the road. 

Simply put, the FGGA Ethics committee examines requests for ethics approval for research involving human subjects. We do so by assigning an application to two of the five members of the committee. These reviewers assess the applications independently, on the basis of a set of pre-established criteria – for instance, research independence and impartiality, protection of vulnerable participants and so on. The review is then sent back to the researcher, sometimes with questions or revision requests. Applicants are expected to integrate our feedback, and, in most cases, the ethics approval is granted.   

We also do many more things such as discussing informed consent and research integrity issues, providing advice to applicants and projects and providing training on these topics for early career researchers. Many of our graduate students have taken our scientific conduct and informed consent seminars. Participating in these seminars is not only mandatory but also great fun, as it allows us to engage with young researchers directly and discuss questions that they are already confronting or will soon confront in their academic careers. 

The FGGA Ethics Committee reviews applications of projects directly involving human subjects that are designed by FGGA researchers, or where the main applicant is a researcher of the FGGA. If you have a project application with the NWO or the ERC, you need an ethics approval. If you are planning surveys, interviews, experiments, participant observation, ethnographic research, or any other research that gathers data from human participants, you will need to submit your project for ethics approval before beginning any of the work involving human subjects. Ethics approval cannot be granted retrospectively. If your project has already received ethics approval from another institution, you can present this approval to the Ethics committee for a shortened, simplified procedure. If you are in doubt, please reach out to our secretary.   

The FGGA website for staff has a link to the Ethics Committee and an email address where you are more than welcome to send us a message. You can find an application form there and also some guidelines.