The central importance of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees means that animal care and use is fundamentally dependent on the application of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals regulations by an institution's committee. It has been suggested that one measure of the success of the IACUC system is the reliability of protocol approvals between institutions. In other words, would a protocol for animal use, approved by the IACUC at one institution, be approved at another institution? This question was addressed specifically by researchers Plous and Herzog in 2001: They concluded that, regardless of whether the research involved terminal or painful procedures, IACUC protocol reviews did not exceed chance levels of intercommittee agreement. The Plous and Herzog work was criticized by some in the animal research community as drawing invalid conclusions because IACUCs rely on knowing the experience of the investigators and staff. The Plous and Herzog study compared responses of in-house IACUCs, who knew the investigators and staff, with blinded IACUCs, who did not know the investigators and staff. The blinded IACUCs did not necessarily have expertise in the species or procedures under consideration, or with the forms used to submit the protocol, and most of the lack of agreement between the non-blinded and blinded IACUC ratings took the form of requests for more information.</ref>