(CHANGER) CHAllenges and innovative chaNGes in research Ethics Reviews

Project funded by European Union – Horizon Europe Programme
Grant Agreement n. 101131683
Duration: 36 months
Start date: 01/01/2024
The project official website

Trust in Science and Technology, as well as the utility and acceptability of their innovative outcomes, is crucially dependent on the ethical qualities of the research. New technologies, transformative research and new research players constantly change the realm of research, and as science and technology progress, ethical challenges also continuously evolve. In the changing research environment, new human rights and principles are arising, impactful risks emerge, and new questions must be asked of the research.

Research Ethics Committees are the link between researchers, research participants and society. Through the process of ethics review of research projects, they ensure respect for values during research. However, existing models of ethics reviews are increasingly challenged by changing research practices and the emergence of new technologies with great social and economic impact.

To address these issues, CHANGER intends to promote changes in research ethics reviews by strengthening the capacities of researchers to incorporate ethical judgements in the project design and implementation, and by supporting capacity building of Research Ethics Committees to address new challenges posed by new technologies and new research practices.

The project consortium includes 15 partners led by the National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos.

News

Dialogue Events completed

A series of five online Dialogue Events was organised between October and December 2025, coordinated by K&I. These events aimed to gather participants’ perspectives on the institutional changes needed to support the adoption of innovative ethical approaches and methodologies for addressing current challenges in research ethics, as well as on potential policy options and legal frameworks to strengthen the protection of human rights within research. Each event targeted a specific group of stakeholders, including researchers (21 October), research ethics experts (30 October), representatives of European and national non-governmental organisations and associations (13 November), representatives of research funding organisations and policy ...

Webinar on research ethics in crisis contexts

A webinar on “Research ethics in crisis contexts” was implemented on 2 October 2025. This event was part of the CHANGER Cafés series, which consists of webinars dedicated to specific research ethics topics. The 2 October webinar featured Donal O'Mathuna, a professor at Ohio State University, and was coordinated by Luciano d'Andrea, a project manager at K&I ...

Fourth CHANGER Consortium meeting

The fourth general meeting of the CHANGER project partners took place on 10–11 September 2025. It took place in Fredrikstad, Norway, at the headquarters of NORSUS, one of the project partners. Luciano d'Andrea, representing K&I, attended the meeting ...

Analysis of challenges to the research ethics review system

Analysis of the data collected on the current challenges facing the research ethics review system was completed in June 2025. This data was collected from 13 focus groups and 21 interviews, which overall involved 78 research ethics experts and researchers, conducted between October 2024 and April 2025. K&I organised one of the focus groups and conducted a series of interviews. The results of the focus groups and interviews will be analysed and presented in a specific report. This report will summarise the findings and propose recommendations ...

Third CHANGER Consortium meeting

The third CHANGER project Consortium meeting took place in Vienna from 27 to 29 January 2025. Hosted by the Technical University of Vienna, the meeting involved analysing the progress of each work package, discussing methods for testing the five new ethical review methods for research projects developed by the project (WP3), including the Consultative Ethics Review, the Narrative Ethics Scenario Building, the Iterative ethics review, the Embedded ethics advisors, and the Two-step consent procedure. These methods will be the subject of a specific project deliverable. Moreover, during the meeting, the initial content of the Dialogue Events on the application of ...

The Second Project Plenary Meeting

The Second Project Plenary meeting of the CHANGER project was held at the headquarters of NCSR Demokritos, in Athens on 6 and 7 June 2024. During the meeting, the activities carried out within the different work packages of the project were presented and discussed, and the programs for the next months were defined. The first part of the meeting also provided an opportunity to discuss the objectives and expected results of the project in relation to the evolution of European research policies. Luciano d'Andrea represented K&I at the meeting ...

Literature review on new ethical challenges in research

The literature review on new ethical challenges for scientific research, related both to technological changes and to the development of new methodologies and research approaches, is nearing completion. The analysis, coordinated by the University of Split School of Medicine, was carried out in some phases. A system of keywords was initially defined for the selection of relevant literature. By consulting research databases (Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science), more than 18,500 articles were identified, which were then reduced to about 13,000 after eliminating duplicates and retracted articles. Based on an analysis of the abstracts, just over 1,700 were then selected and ...

Project Kick-off Meeting held in Athens

The CHANGER project Kick-off Meeting was held at NCSR Demokritos’ campus in Athens, Greece, on 22 and 23 January 2024. In the opening session Isidoros Karatzas, Head of the Research Ethics and Integrity Sector of the European Commission, highlighted the expectation that the project will develop novel solutions to guide scientific research and innovation in a rapidly changing scientific and technological environment. During the meeting, the different work packages of the project were presented and discussed and the activity plan for the first part of the project was analysed in detail. K&I was represented by Alfonso Alfonsi and Fabio Feudo ...