Research Standards

Protecting The Bluelight Community

It is important for us to ensure that our community is protected from the harm that can be done by research. We have developed a checklist to evaluate researchers and research projects before we agree to support them.

When you partner with us, we will ask you to provide:

1. proof of your official academic status - your full name and contact details, official email address and homepage;
2. alternative contact information in the event that you move universities and become unreachable;
3. if you are a student, we also require your supervisors name and contact details;
4. a statement that your research project has been approved by a university ethics committee.

If your project is accessible by us (eg. an online survey) we will view the survey and see whether it meets our standards:

• anonymity of respondents must be assured;
• measures and questions should be clearly expressed;
• the length of time taken to complete the survey should match the time described in the participant information;
• participants must be treated with respect.

Strengthening The Research Dialectic

We also request that you respond to comments within your discussion thread. If members of our community ask questions about your project or make comments, we hope that this information will be seen as useful and as part of a two-way dialogue between yourself and our community. You can subscribe to the thread to receive email alerts when our members reply to your thread.

We request that you post results of your study when they are available. Our community is particularly interested in seeing what becomes of research data as we often only see the request for recruitment, then nothing else.

We understand there are restrictions around publishing, such as the inability for us to host a fulltext journal article due to copyright. Bluelight fully supports publication in open access journals so you can easily link to your article straight from our forums. However, if your article is behind a paywall, we would still appreciate you posting a link while providing a summary for our community.

Finally, we ask that you acknowledge Bluelight.org in your publications based on research where you obtained our assistance.

NOTE: If you intend to use Bluelight content as data, we would like to draw your attention to this clause in our User Agreement:

"All messages posted become the exclusive property of Bluelight.org. Unauthorized reproduction or use is prohibited. Bluelight partners with both public and private research organizations and we encourage researchers to contact us for more information on our research standards and protocols."