Institutional Review Board Watch

... describes its reason for being this way:

Institutional review boards have been set up at nearly all research institutions in the US, to protect the welfare of human research participants.

Over the past decade, IRB's have grown greatly in power and range of authority. The home institutions have, however, largely abrogated their responsiblity to oversee and control the procedures followed by IRB's. As a consequence, the IRB's have increasingly harrassed researchers and slowed down important research, without protecting any human research participants.

The purpose of this site is to chronicle the abuses by IRB's.

I'd say one of the first rules of being a watchdog is to explain who you are, which this site doesn't do as far as I can see. Or at the very least, you should explain why you can't explain who you are.

I learned of this site from a posting on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, which agrees the process can "get a bit Kafka-esque."