Dear animal care staff,
Dear lab technicians,
This survey is part of an international survey "Framing the Role of Animal Care Staff and Lab Technicians in the Discussion about Experimental Planning and Conduct of Animal Studies: Enhancing Science Reproducibility and Workers' Satisfaction," carried out by an international research team within the framework of the COST IMPROVE action (https://cost-improve.eu) financed by European funds and coordinated by the Translational Animal Research Center at the Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center, Mainz, Germany.
In this survey, we are interested in the involvement of animal care staff and lab technicians in the discussion about the planning and conducting of research projects involving animals in your current animal facility.
Important definitions:
By animal care staff, we refer to the people responsible for regularly caring for animals that will be used, bred, or supplied for scientific purposes (for instance, animal caretakers, animal technicians).
By lab technicians, we refer to those who work in a laboratory doing experiments with animals, animal samples, or alternative methods to animal research, maintaining the laboratory equipment, and performing analytical or experimental procedures.
By experimental planning, we refer to creating a detailed practical experimental plan (e.g., duration of the experiment, animal housing, sampling methods, data collection, and acquisition procedures) that allows you to obtain the maximum amount of information related to your project objectives.
By experimental conduct, we refer to the actual performance of experiments in order to systematically obtain information for specific scientific questions. (i.e., compliance with protocols and SOPs).
Approximate completion time: 15 minutes.
We plan to disseminate results to the scientific community and stakeholders, by providing aggregated data analysis, through reports, scientific publications, and conference presentations.
Coordinators:
Dr. Fernando Gonzalez Uarquin - TARCforce3R, University Medical Center Mainz.
Dr. Penny Hawkins - RSPCA.
Contact: TARCforce3R@uni-mainz.de
