In Australia, sharing of data arising from human or animal research typically requires the requestor to receive their own research ethics approval. In a PID-enhanced workflow, a PID for ethics committees makes sense.
Has anyone thought about (or better yet - implemented) a PID for research ethics committees?
The ROR for the parent institution is not necessarily appropriate, as there might be more than one research ethics committee within an institution (my host has at least two - one for human research and another for animal research). Additionally, under the Australian Codes that govern human and animal research, an institution may use an external committee or share a committee with another institution.
In the FAIR Workflows context, we discussed how to make explicit the ethical terms related to the project, and opted for linking the research project or outputs to the specific approval document (usually includes info about data anonymization, terms for consent, timeframe for sharing etc., overlapping with DMP), which usually has an internal identifier.
In that instance, we didn’t go and create a DOI for the ethics approval (or deposit it separately in a repository). But you are right it is an interesting topic for discussion, as the ethics approval process is rarely tapped into when we discuss open research practices, and the practice varies wildly from domain to domain, not to mention institute by institute. I’m also curious to hear more use cases for either identifying the committee or the documents they issue.