{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03376068376068376, 'fraction_numerical': 0.024145299145299146, 'mean_word_length': 5.317139001349528, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Commentary 1: Weksler-Derri et al.’s “Ethical Challenges in Participatory Research with Autistic Adults in Israel”

There is a growing movement toward participatory research in the field of autism (Chown et al., 2017; Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019; Nicolaidis et al., 2011). This movement is in part driven by a dissatisfaction by the Autistic and autism communities with the preponderance of research focusing on the underlying biology and causes of autism rather than on research that has a meaningful impact on people’s dayto-day lives (Pellicano, Dinsmore, & Charman, 2014). In our view, this reflects a wider movement in healthrelated fields to democratize the research process, ensuring that community members are involved in decisions around research, including setting priorities for research, its design and implementation, and interpretation and dissemination of the findings (e.g., Hickey, 2018; Israel et al., 2005; Jones & Wilsdon, 2018). Involving community members in this way—that is, doing participatory autism research—has the potential to make scientific discoveries more thoroughly relevant to communities, tailored to the realities of their everyday lives and consistent with their values (Chalmers, 2004; Lloyd & White, 2011). Weksler-Derri, Shwed, and Davidovitch (2019) describes one particular variant of this change—research that involved an advisory committee comprised of autistic adults, some who were members of the Autistic Community of Autistic Adults in Israel (ACI) and some who were not, who provided their experiential expertise (cf. Collins & Evans, 2002; Milton, 2014) on the research measures, qualitative themes, and research outcomes. As Weksler-Derri et al. (2019) point out, involving community members in research in this way can raise ethical issues that go beyond more traditional forms of research and which can pose challenges to regulatory governance frameworks, codes of conduct, and ethics review procedures (Banks et al., 2013; Flicker, Travers, Guta, McDonald, & Meagher, 2007; Wilson, Kenny, & Dickson-Swift, 2018). In this instance, the challenges include identifying which community members should be included on advisory boards and how the general commitment to anonymity in the research process should be treated when community participants evince a desire to set such a commitment to one side. In the current article, however, Weksler-Derri et al. (2019) attempt to resolve these ethical disputes without explicit reference to the fundamental ideal underlying this kind of work. This strikes us as a mistake. A compelling foundational ideal can play a key point of reference in ongoing ethical discussion and consideration, making the absence of one from Weksler-Derri et al.’s (2019) discussion problematic. This absence makes it extremely difficult to resolve the practical ethical issues that arise during a participatory research process, as there is little way of ranking potential outcomes against each other. Identifying such an overarching ideal can be difficult, of course, and that difficulty might explain the absence here. There are many potentially compelling commitments that arise in complex matters of research into health and wellbeing, and they can often appear incompatible. Fortunately, the very notion of “democratizing” the research process—a notion that is at least implicit in the current article—could have provided a means by which to identify such an ideal. In the remainder of this brief commentary, we set out how that could have worked. The desire to “democratize” any process involves recognizing that each participant deserves some equality of respect in that process and that means, in turn, that they must be granted relative equality of standing in any decision-making process (Allen, 2016). This, in turn, requires that inequalities of power and influence, often either hidden or ignored in the research process, become the subject of considerable ethical attention. Such inequalities of power and influence matter both because they are likely to have arbitrarily emerged across time and because they are likely to result in one participant or groups of participants having greater or lesser respect and standing than others in the research process. Elucidating the ideal in this way would enable a far clearer approach to the ethical issues raised by Weksler-Derri et al. (2019) to emerge. To give some examples: being alert to the need to ensure all participants are granted equality of respect and standing should lead researchers—and ethical review 858524 JREXXX10.1177/1556264619858524aJournal of Empirical Research on Human Research EthicsPellicano and Stears research-article2019