Please keep a close eye on the calendar when planning ahead to submit continuing reviews or any other submissions that have an approval deadline. If items need to go to full board, they should come to the IRB no later than the listed submission deadline to ensure placement on the agenda you’d like them to go. A couple of things to keep in mind:
- With only a few exceptions, you can only have one outstanding study form pending in CLARA at a time. That means that if you have a modification pending, you will not be able to submit a continuing review form until the modification is approved. If you encounter a time crunch because a modification is taking longer than expected, you do have the option of canceling the modification to allow the CR to be submitted and processed. But you cannot have both a modification and a CR pending simultaneously.
- Please keep in mind that new submissions and some modifications may need to be reviewed by several other institutional offices before they can be considered by the IRB. Therefore, if your new submission or modification may require additional reviews, please enter it into CLARA well in advance of any approval deadline to make sure everybody who needs to review the study will be able to do so.
- Fifth Tuesdays also may slow down IRB reviews of full-board items, as the IRB does not meet on the fifth Tuesday of the month. There will be fifth Tuesdays in June, September, and December 2015, and the IRB will not meet the last Tuesday of those months.
- Lastly, while it’s extraordinarily rare, the IRB does occasionally have to cancel meetings. We had to cancel two in a row this past winter due to weather. That caused a problem for some PIs who needed their continuing reviews approved.
In a nutshell, please remember to give yourself, and the IRB, plenty of time to submit and review items that face an approval deadline.