Why aren’t ethics applications publicly available? If not the full application, then at least the investigators' names, the title, a plain language summary, the application number, and the date it was approved.
A public record would help confirm that the research actually took place. We live in a world where entire papers can be written in under 30 minutes. Many thousands of researchers are using this new technology to boost their CVs with meaningless papers. We need ways to differentiate the hard work from the instant slop.
Genuine researchers could give their ethics application number and ethics website in their papers. We already do this for trial registration, for example, using the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry. The fraudsters might fake or reuse numbers, but people doing this have been caught. A public database would make it far easier for a journal’s research integrity staff to verify that a study had prospective ethical approval.
What about projects that are commercially sensitive? That’s easily fixed. The information is entered into the public database but is only made available after a reasonable delay, ideally around the time that the researchers are hoping to publish their results.
A public record would also be useful when applying for data access from a third party. For example, a government agency could easily check that I have ethics approval for accessing hospital data.
I’m not the first to suggest this, and there’s a longer and more eloquent argument by Holly Fernadez Lynch in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. I haven’t heard any good arguments for keeping this key information hidden.