Drawing on the Global Ethics Charter for the Protection of Healthy Volunteers, the Council sets out concrete recommendations to make participant representation and fair compensation work in practice
June 4, 2026 – 1Day Sooner’s Participant Council issued a set of nine practical recommendations to help research teams, sponsors, and ethics bodies better represent and fairly compensate healthy volunteers in clinical trials.
On representation, the Council recommended several mechanisms to ensure participant-centered input to trial design and implementation, including consulting an independent healthy-volunteer representation and systematically collecting participant feedback at the end of the trial. On compensation, the Council recommended that payment terms be disclosed to volunteers early, that compensation be monetary by default, and that payments be made throughout the study rather than withheld until completion.
These recommendations grew out of the Council’s discussion of the Global Ethics Charter for the Protection of Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Trials. Published by VOLRETHICS in June 2024, the Charter sets out 15 rights intended to better protect healthy volunteers from harm and exploitation, and has since drawn endorsement from a growing number of academics, researchers, and governing bodies around the world. While the Charter offers important guidance, many of its principles raise practical questions about how they should be implemented—questions the Council set out to address for two of its articles: adequate representation of healthy volunteers throughout the research process (Article 3) and fair financial compensation for participation (Article 13).
VOLRETHICS welcomed the recommendations. “These recommendations translate the Charter’s principles into concrete, workable steps that research teams can adopt today. We are grateful to the Participant Council for grounding this guidance in the lived experience of volunteers.” said François Bompart, President of VOLRETHICS. Shadreck Mwale, Vice-President of VOLRETHICS, added “We are delighted to see the Global Ethics Charter used by 1Day Sooner, an organization with whom we share the challenging objective of empowering healthy volunteers globally to get their voices heard.” The organization has committed to sharing the recommendations through its networks of researchers and ethicists to promote their effective implementation.
The recommendations were developed at a Council meeting on April 30, 2026, and approved by a significant majority of members in a post-meeting survey. In a pre-meeting survey, most members found the Charter’s level of protection balanced (69%), while 23% felt it was too protective and 8% said their view depended on the specific article. Members voiced broad support for the Charter’s core aims, even as some cautioned that added regulation or stricter protections could discourage participation or make ethically run challenge trials harder to conduct. With those tensions in mind, discussion focused on turning the principles of Articles 3 and 13 into guidance that is meaningful in practice rather than symbolic—strengthening trust, transparency, and engagement in clinical research worldwide.
Read the full list of recommendations here and view the meeting minutes here.
Learn more by visiting the Participant Council website.
Media Contact:
Tess Lanzarotta
tess.lanzarotta@1daysooner.org