>>I looked into this once and it was a few thousand dollars. Our IRB cost is 10% of that, or less, depending on the number you are choosing for "few." Maybe if

>>I looked into this once and it was a few thousand dollars. Our IRB cost is 10% of that, or less, depending on the number you are choosing for "few." Maybe if you used WIRB or another IRB that is specific for drug trials, yes, it can run that expensive. For run of the mill published papers, no, you should not be using services like that. >>There's also something vaguely worrying about the incentives of a for-profit IRB. This would imply any reviewer or journal actually checks IRB qualifications on submission, review, or referee. Devor et al in the JSCR/Ohio State case and all the reviewers coming out as a result of that and saying they don't check IRB shows that it is anything but. Again, this isn't true for drug trials, but for expedited review minimal risk studies, there is no reason to be using bureaucratic and slow moving IRB providers. EDIT: >>Even $1000 is going to be prohibitively expensive for many of these projects. There are many IRB providers who do expedited review, minimal-risk, standard studies for less than half of this cost. EDIT2: >>I think overseeing research is part of a university's job (and, as I complained above), one that is already paid for via overhead. Sure. I'm not going to argue against the idea that the government or the university should do their jobs that they were paid to do. But they regularly and demonstrably do not, in far more fields than IRB. Private markets exist to go around this bureaucracy. IRB is no different.