Issues with Ethics in Research – A Case Study of the IHU Mediterranee Infection

The practice of clinical research is strictly regulated by law. During submission and review processes, compliance of such research with the laws enforced in the country where it was conducted is not always correctly filled in by the authors or verified by the editors. Here we review 456 studies published by the IHU Méditerranée Infection (Marseille, France) and identify a range of issues with the stated authorization of the research, ethically and potentially legally. Of these, 248 were conducted with the same ethics committee reference, even though the subjects, samples and countries were different. Thirty-nine did not even contain a reference to the ethics committee while they contain research on human beings. With this example, we call for stricter control by publishers of the regulatory documentation related to clinical research during the publication process. All supplementary materials are available on https://osf.io/ueqf8/.