The Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP) released revised accreditation standards June 1--the first major revision since the organization established the standards in 2001.

The revised standards, used to measure the ethics and quality of research involving human participants, are available for public comment on AAHRPP's web site. AAHRPP released the proposed standards a month earlier than planned and hopes to publish the final standards by October 1, depending on the number of comments that the organization receives. If all goes as scheduled, organizations applying for accreditation will begin using the new standards in March 2010.

As part of the revision process, AAHRPP has reorganized and clarified some elements, consolidated redundant elements, and expanded elements to include transnational research, conflict of interest, community-based participatory research and data monitoring. By combining some standards and elements, AAHRPP reduced the number of domains from five to three, the number of standards from 22 to 15 and the number of elements from 77 to 65.