2022Q1 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs-Draft

General

The Ethics Committee was established by the ACL on October 6, 2021 [[]], appointing a nine person team: three co-chairs, one from each major region of the ACL membership, and six members Effort was made to balance both gender and regional representation.

Since the establishment of the committee, the chairs have held their own biweekly meetings to coordinate work, and the committee as a whole has convened monthly meetings to ensure targets are met.

Efforts

The Ethics Committee has made progress on a number of internal initiatives, largely organised around delegated subcommittees to make progress. These include

• #Ethics Survey
• #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
• #Ethics Education and Outreach
• #Committee Scope
• #Committee Procedure

Committee Scope

The responsibility and the definition of ethics is construed differently among parties. This subcommittee works towards a clearer definition of the scope and responsibilities among the AEC and other internal committees within the ACL.

The committee's current understanding is that the ACL Exec does not have a specific scope for the AEC and in some cases, also not for other subcommittees of the ACL, passing the decision of scope to the subcommittees themselves. This subcommittee thus is working towards crafting an appropriate scope for the AEC's work.

As such, the AEC decided that the scope of the committee would largely be looking towards long-term strategic goals, instead of as an operational team to handle individual ethics cases.