Ethical Guidelines for the Use of Animals in Research

Advances in Human Physiology Research  endorses the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting experiments using live animals. In the manuscripts, any additional guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals that were used in the experiment should be indicated. Briefly, the authors should also include animal details (e.g. species, gender, age, weight), animal housing conditions and husbandry information, and relevant steps taken to ameliorate pain and suffering of the animals in the Methodology section.

For studies reporting experiments that involve testing on regulated animals (i.e. all live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates), authors must identify the committee or organization (e.g. author’s Institutional Ethics Review Board) approving the experiments in the Methodology section of the manuscript, which should also detail ethics approval information such as the name of the granting committee or organization and the approval identifiers, i.e. reference numbers. For research conducted on non-regulated animals, a statement should be made as to why ethical approval was not required.

Studies involving vertebrates or higher invertebrates must only be carried out after obtaining approval from the appropriate ethics committee. As a minimum, the project identification code, date of approval and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be stated in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’. Research procedures must be carried out in accordance with national and institutional regulations.