A Message from the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board

IRB Announcements

• IRB Question of the Week

IRB Question of the Week

We encourage investigators to send us questions that would be of general interest to the human subjects research community. Address your questions to the IRB Director, Christopher Ryan (ryancm@upmc.edu) using as the subject line ‘IRB Question of the Week.’

QUESTION:   I'm submitting a protocol in OSIRIS and want to know what my options are for spellchecking sections of my electronic application?

ANSWER:   The software the OSIRIS system is built with does not inherently support spellchecking, but the IRB is aware of two proven approaches to spellchecking.

1. There are many third-party plug-ins that can spell check the information you enter into OSIRIS. The Internet Explorer plug-in many of the IRB staff use is called ieSpell. After installing this software you can right click in textboxes and select "Check Spelling" and it will find incorrectly spelled words and suggest replacements.
   
   Click here to download ieSpell.
   
   
2. The Mozilla Firefox web browser has a built in spell check feature that underlines misspelled words in red, in the same manner as Microsoft Word. Mozilla Firefox is available for both Windows and Macintosh.
   
   Click here to download Firefox.

NOTE: Computers on certain networks, including a majority of the UPMC network, are 'locked' to prevent users from installing software. Please contact your local IT support group for help installing these programs if this is the case.