I have known Lucy Pickering for a long time. I first met her almost 30 years ago through a mutual friend, and I got to know her well some years later when we were doing our PhDs at the same time. We talked a lot about ethics and methods and writing, as doctoral students will, and discovered we could work well together in the same physical space; there are not many people I can do that with.

A few years after we graduated, Lucy was ethics lead for the Association of Social Anthropologists when I was ethics lead for the Social Research Association. Our conversations continued and during that period we published our first co-written journal article, about the ethics of presentation, which has now had over 150 citations.

Eight years later we published our second co-written journal article. We began thinking about, talking about, and working on this article in 2019, but we couldn’t quite find our way, then the pandemic intervened. We returned to our ideas in early 2024, the article came together quickly this time, and we submitted our first draft in June of that year. Over the next 14 months it went through three sets of very helpful revisions and a tortuous production process, and was finally published at the end of July 2025. The title is ‘How can we reform research ethics management to make it fit for purpose?’ and we are both astonished and delighted by the number of downloads: over 750 in the first six weeks.

While we were working on it, we were struck by how few accounts we could find of firsthand accounts of going through ethical review processes, and as we were finishing work on this article, we came up with the idea for an edited collection on people’s experiences with research ethics committees, institutional review boards and equivalent bodies. We talked to Bristol University Press about this and they were enthusiastic, so we have put out a call for chapter proposals. The deadline is midnight GMT on Sunday 30 November 2025, and we are excited to see what we get. Perhaps you would like to contribute a proposal, or you know someone who would, or you would be willing to share the call on social media – any of those would be a great help. Thank you.