Review of research ethics guidelines on payment of healthy volunteers

Local research ethics committees (RECs) have a huge role in determining what payment is acceptable, but there is little guidance provided for them. This gives RECs the freedom to make context-specific decisions, but also leads to variation in the protection of research subjects. Based on these findings, we make the following recommendations: (1) More countries need guidelines addressing payment of healthy volunteers in medical research. (2) These guidelines need more details than are currently included. (3) RECs also need guidelines to aid them in context-specific decisions on payment of research participants.