The Bates College Institutional Review Board (IRB) has been established to approve research projects involving the use of human participants (or source-identifiable biospecimens from human participants). The IRB exists both because Bates wants to ensure that research participants are treated with the utmost respect and safety and because federal law requires that all federally funded research involving human participants receive IRB approval. The research projects concerned include not only standard research but in-class research and community-based research (CBR) projects as well, and extend to journals and photographs, video and tape recordings of participants.