Comment by pacbard

The federal government has updated the rules for exemption in 2018. The MSU link is more of a summary than the actual rules.

The fact that a mailing list is publicly available is what made me worry about the applicability of any sort of exemption. In order for human subject research to be exempt from IRB review, the research needs to be deemed less than minimal risk to participants.

The fact that their experiment happens in public and that anyone can find their patches and individual maintainers' responses (and approval) of them makes me wonder if the participants are at risk of losing professional reputation (in that they approved a patch that was clearly harmful) or even employment (in that their employer might find out about their participation in this study and move them to less senior positions as they clearly cannot properly vet a patch). This might be extreme, but it is still a likely outcome given the overall sentiment of the paper.

All research that poses any harm to participants has to be IRB approved and the researchers have to show that the benefits to participants (and the community at large) surpass the individual risks. I am still not sure what benefits this work has to the OSS community and I am very surprised that this work did not require IRB supervision at all.

As far as work on a public street is concerned, IRB doesn't regulate common activities that happen in public and for which people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But, as soon as you start interacting with them (e.g., intervene in their environment), IRB review is required.

You can read and analyze a publicly available mailing list (and this would even qualify as non human subject research if the data is properly anonymized) without IRB review or at most a deliberation of exempt status but you cannot email the mailing list yourself as a researcher as the act of emailing is an intervention that changes other people's environment, therefore qualifying as human subject research.