International Workshop
on the Integration of Animal-Centred Principles into the Ethical Review of Animal Research

OVERVIEW

This half-day workshop aims to introduce an animal-centered ethical review framework for researchers who work with animals and invite them to trial and assess its feasibility, usefulness, and adoptability for their own projects. Workshop activities will include plenary and group sessions in which the framework’s implementation and its potential to enhance animal welfare and agency in research contexts will be discussed. Participants will be encouraged to use their own projects as case studies to gouge how they might use the framework in their research. Along with feedback on how such a tool might help researchers to conduct animal-centered ethical reviews, the workshop seeks to invite interested participants to contribute a book chapter for a collection of case studies focusing on the application of the framework in different research contexts. The collection will include case studies within and beyond ACI, with the long-term aim of advancing ethical standards for any research involving animals.

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WORKSHOP AIM

This half-day workshop will explore the feasibility, usefulness, and overall adoptability of the ACR framework as a tool for conducting animal-centered ethical assessments of research projects involving animals. Following an opening session introducing its possible application within the ethical review process, participants will take part in a speculative exercise: they will be encouraged to apply the framework to the ethical review of one of their research projects, enabling a theoretical evaluation of how the framework could be integrated into their work (in a real scenario, the application of the ACR framework to the ethical review of a research proposal would be done with the oversight of the body responsible for presiding to the ethical review process). The exercise will be followed by a session during which envisaged implementation challenges and potential benefits, will be discussed. At the end of the workshop, along with feedback on the applicability of the framework and suggestions for improvement, the organizers will collect expressions of interest from participants willing to contribute a book chapter based on their own case studies (whether those explored during the workshop or different ones) for an edited collection that will be published by CABI. 

The event is part of the Animal-Centered Research project, which has the long-term goal of proposing a tool based on animal-centered principles to be integrated within the ethical review process of any research involving animals. 

 

Participants and grouping

Researchers and professional practitioners who are experienced or interested in involving in their research animals for scientific purposes are invited to participate in the workshop. Participation is open to all disciplines (e.g., ACI, veterinary, farming, medicine, welfare, conservation, zookeeping, etc.). Researchers and practitioners at any stage of their practice or study development are encouraged to participate, including those who intend to start a piece of research in the future or who are interested in knowing more about the framework but are not yet sure whether they might wish or be able to contribute a case study to the collection. 

Participants will be allocated to three groups (conditional on reaching a minimum number in each group). Group A will include those applying the ACR framework to studies for which the ethical review (ER) has already been completed following ethics procedures in use at their institution (completed ER). This group will conduct retrospective analyses of their ethics to compare how these would have been different had the ACR framework been available. Group B will be formed by participants currently working on, or approaching, the ethical review of their research (ongoing ER). Group C will comprise participants who do not currently work on a study but are keen to know how they could apply the framework to their future research (future ER). All three groups’ outputs will provide feedback on the feasibility, usefulness, and adoptability of the framework. 

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Workshop activities

The workshop will start with a quick round of presentations of each participant followed by a first plenary session where the organizers will present the main elements of the ACR framework and how they can be integrated in an iterative ethical review process. 

Attendees will then choose whether they prefer to work on their completed, ongoing or future project and will be divided into groups based on their main area of interest (e.g. e.g. animals in entertainment, farming, assistance work, etc.). Each participant will be invited to work independently on their own project, ensuring that they can be guided by the framework in a way that is meaningful to their own research. During this individual exercise, the division into groups is foreseen to enable exchanges of challenges, ideas, and notes with group members should anyone deem necessary a brief collaborative discussion on their case.

Afterwards, groups will come together in a plenary session during which each group will share with the other attendees common opportunities and challenges emerged during the mock application of the framework, to collectively assess the applicability, usefulness and adoptability of the ACR framework in different areas and at different stages of a research design: retrospectively as a tool to assess the ethos of a past project, concomitantly as a tool to support research design and the related ethical review process, and preemptively as a tool to reflect on the ethics of a research project in advance of developing a research design and undertaking an ethical review process.   

The detailed schedule of activities is described in Table 1.

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Post-workshop activities

At the end of the workshop, individual and collective feedback will be collected, and participants will be invited to express their purposive interest in authoring a case study, contributing to a chapter of the collection for a book published by CABI [13]. Participants who express their interest in authoring a book chapter will be contacted after the workshop and asked to apply the framework to the ethical review process of one of their research projects, as a case study to be submitted to the organizing team by December 2027. Email addresses will be collected from interested participants to facilitate follow-up communications. 

Prospective authors will be contacted after the workshop to agree on the technical and administrative details of their proposed contribution to the collection, including consent for the use and governance of the materials intended for publication. None of the workshop outputs will be used by the organizers as publishing materials, and any case study discussed by participants during the workshop will only be represented in the book if the participants themselves choose to use it to write a book chapter.

During the writing process, the book editors will be available to provide guidance through brief consultations, should the participants require support during the development of their case studies.​

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REGISTRATION

Information on how to register for the event will be made available on the Conference website closer to the time.

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