IRBNet Topics

You Spoke, We Listened, What We Are Doing

Question 1: How can committee administrators organize submission documents to maintain document versioning?

Question 2: Does IRBNet require users to open PDF documents in Adobe Reader?

Answer 1: Committee administrators can “force” document versioning, even if the submission documents are stored in separate packages. The document revision histories can be combined by dragging one document onto the “Document Revision History” icon of another with a similar document type. The IRBNet “Drag and Drop” feature is fully described in VAIRRS University Task Area 5 - Access Submission Manager Tool and Review Submission https://bit.ly/3ni1auV (VA network access only). 

Answer 2: No. Depending on your local IT policies, you may have the ability to customize how PDF files are opened when using IRBNet (or any other website). Chrome, Edge and Firefox have built-in PDF viewers that allow you to conveniently open and read PDFs in your browser. See below for instructions on setting this feature in the major internet browsers.

Note: the in-browser PDF viewers do not support PDFs created using Adobe LiveCycle Designer (i.e., ERDSP). In those cases, the PDF can only be opened in Adobe Reader or Acrobat.

Chrome
To enable/disable the automatic PDF viewer in Chrome:
1. In a Chrome window, click on the icon with the three dots stacked on top of one another in the top, right-hand corner of the screen.
2. Select “Settings” from the drop-down.
3. Click on “Privacy and security” on the left side of the page, and then select “Site settings” from the table.
4. Scroll down to the “Content” section of the page and click on the “Additional content settings” drop-down.
5. Click on “PDF documents,” and then click on the switch on the right side to toggle between enabling and disabling the PDF viewer.
6. When the switch is blue, the Chrome PDF viewer will become disabled, and PDF documents will be opened in your system’s default PDF viewer instead. When the switch is grey, the Chrome PDF viewer will be enabled, and PDF documents will open in a browser tab.

Edge
To enable/disable this feature in Edge:
1. In an Edge window, click on the icon with the three dots in the top, right-hand corner of the screen.
2. Select “Settings” from the drop-down.
3. On the left menu, select “Cookies and site permissions”
4. Under the “All permissions” list, select “PDF documents," then click the switch to toggle between enabling and disabling the PDF viewer.
5. When the switch is blue, the Edge PDF viewer will become disabled, and PDFs will be opened in your system’s default PDF viewer. When the switch is gray, the Edge PDF viewer will be enabled, and PDF documents will open in a browser tab.

Firefox
To change the options available in Firefox:
1. In a Firefox window, click on the icon in the top, right-hand corner of the screen with three horizontal lines stacked on top of one another.
2. Select “Options” from the drop-down.
3. Scroll down to the “Applications” section of the page. Here, you may edit which application to open PDF documents in when browsing in Firefox.
4. Click on “Open in Firefox” (or whichever action is selected) to the right of “Portable Document Format (PDF)” in the table, and then select which action you would like to take upon opening a PDF document from the drop-down.
5. When you click on a PDF document in IRBNet, the option that you have designated via these settings will be automatically chosen as the “Open with” application in the dialog box that appears.