Animal Research Ethics Changes

Important information on changes to staff and reporting 

Animal ethics reports

The Australian Code for the Care and Use of Animals for Scientific Purposes makes it mandatory for researchers to submit progress and final reports for their animal research and teaching projects.  There will be a slight change in the reporting requirements for animal ethics reports.  Previously, animal ethics progress and final reports were all due at the same time in March.  As a result, reminders were sent out at the beginning of the year.  As of January 2021, this process will be changing so that reports will be due on the anniversary of the approval date.

This will allow for more logical reporting, covering work undertaken in the previous year since approval, rather than in the calendar year.  This is intended to spread the workload for those researchers with many Animal Ethics Committee (AEC) approvals, so all reports are not due at once, and always cover one year of work.

Principal Investigators will receive three reminder emails; 2 months, 1 month and 2 weeks before your report is due.

Please note: Researchers will receive an email reminder in December 2020 to submit their 2020 reports. From 1 January 2021 you will then receive reports on the anniversary of your approval date to cover the progress and animal use. For some researchers this may cover only a small time period. If no work was done in that period, email us letting us know.

If you have not undertaken any animal work since your last report, please send the ethics team an email to notify us. If no more animal work will be done, you may want to consider submitting a final report.

This is a new process for JCU so please let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and we appreciate your patience during this implementation phase.

New Animal Ethics Officer

Our Animal Ethics Officer, Nicole Little, will be on parental leave until October 2021, and we would like to welcome Melissa Joyce as her replacement. Melissa has previously worked in the College of Science and Engineering and is just finishing her masters on the aquaculture of red claw crayfish.