Pre-treatment Administrative Responsibilities

Chapter 18 — Pre-treatment Administrative Responsibilities Before a single subject is treated, the experimenter faces a checklist of administrative obligations that determine whether the study will be feasible, ethical, and credible. This chapter walks through the full pre-treatment sequence: IRB protocol approval, pilot studies, pre-registration, pre-analysis plans (PAPs), data use agreements, and registered reports. A six-item due diligence checklist distills best practices. The key message: these tasks are not bureaucratic overhead—they are the infrastructure of trustworthy science, and their completion neither guarantees nor substitutes for genuine ethical commitment.

1. The experimental process starts long before the application of treatment and involves several administrative tasks — from IRB approval to pre-registration — which can be time-consuming and create setbacks.
2. While some view pre-treatment administrative tasks as purely tedious and burdensome, they serve an important purpose in achieving EP1 and EP2 ethically and cost-effectively.
3. A six-item due diligence administrative checklist offers best practices to attenuate onerous experiences, promote transparency and confidence, and give your science its best chance to run smoothly and timely.
4. Experimental morals cannot be outsourced: administrative task completion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to achieve an ethically gold-standard study.