Not everything with a signature on it needs to be kept, especially when the grant has already been submitted, reviewed, and the project is either funded / published or long since abandoned, with only grudges against reviewers to remember it by. In the folders I’d started rather than taken over, there were no printed emails, but I’d kept lots of stuff that I now know to be useless. There were faxes, too, and pretty much every single draft of the grants and manuscripts that were submitted well before my time. And I do mean everything – there were endless printouts of email conversations about arranging meetings to discuss the project, that kind of thing. Some folders contained reams and reams of printed out emails – the person who initiated most of the folders is old-school, and doesn’t trust electronic copies, so she prints everything. So I kept everything, probably thinking that I’d go through it all a few months in and decide what to keep and what to recycle. Much of it was in folders that were handed over to me when I first started, and back then I didn’t have a solid grasp of what kinds of documents are important to keep. But I thought it was probably best to start at the top of the front piles.Īs I started to wade through everything, I realised how useless most of the paper actually was. I am not a tidy person, to say the least, and I knew the folder I needed was likely to be somewhere near the bottom of one of the piles at the very back of my desk. With a sigh, I regarded the piles and piles of stacked up folders and loose paper all over my work area. I had a vague, misty memory of this, but no good idea of where the file might be. One email said that the original application file – dating from the mid 1990s – had been dropped off at my desk while I was at a meeting. I searched through all my old emails, and eventually found some correspondence dating from my first few months in this job. We’ve never been asked for the original consent form before, but this time we’d requested a couple of minor protocol changes alongside the usual annual renewal, which must have been what triggered the request. The active patient accrual phase was well and truly over by then, and we’ve just been renewing the ethics certificate every year to allow us to keep following patients and hence assess correlations with long-term clinical outcomes. My boss took over this project when the original PI retired a few years ago, before I started my current job.
I searched all my computer files (I use extremely logical folder and file names, and rename every file that people send me to fit my structure) and found… One of the Research Ethics Board applications I submitted last week bounced back today, with a request to attach the original patient consent form used for sample acquisition. Posts of the week: Alyssa, Anthony Fejes, Austin Elliott, Eva Amsen, Jeanne Sather, Masks of Eris, Microbiologist XX, Pika, ScientistMother, Steffi Suhr, Stephen Curry, StyleyGeek, Thomas Joseph and Toaster Sunshine each had two posts make the Ambivalent Academic, Bean-Mom, Carlyn Zwarenstein, Caroline Sober, Digital Cuttlefish, DrugMonkey, EcoGeoFemme, Elizabeth Moritz, Frank Norman, GrrlScientist, Jim Caryl, Joseph Lewis, Linda Lin, MadHatter, Makita, MissPrism, PZ Myers, Raf Aerts, Richard Grant, Ruchi, Sara Fletcher, Scicurious, Uphill Down Dale, Viktor Poor and Vishal Kalel had one post in BRC this year.Īgain, many thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, and/or posted this year.
(I can reveal that three people from this list have made the shortlist of the top 33 comments!) And it’s an extra Chanukah present for Cromercrox! Woohoo!Ĭhall and Cromercrox, please email me at vwxynot at gmail and we’ll sort out your prizes!Īnd, to make sure I honour everyone who won bragging rights this year, the other winners (who I couldn’t include above without making the charts look ridiculous) were as follows:Ĭomments of the week: Cromercrox, DuWayne, EcoGeoFemme, Lisbeth, Pika, Professor in Training, RPS77 and Ruchi featured twice Ambivalent Academic, Bean-Mom, Biocheme Belle, DrugMonkey, Elizabeth, GrrlScientist, HGG, MadHatter, Mel, Nat Blair, Natalie, Pawl Bearing, Prof-like Substance, ScienceGirl, Silver Fox, Sonja and Unbalanced Reaction featured once each.