BACKGROUND Community engagement in research has gained momentum as an approach to improving research, to helping ensure that community concerns are taken into account, and to informing ethical decision-making when research is conducted in contexts of vulnerability. However, guidelines and scholarship regarding community engagement are arguably unsettled, making it difficult to implement and eva...

Formal clinical ethics review first developed in the USA and most hospitals there have structures in place. This is often a clinical ethics committee. Developments have been slower in the UK, where there has been uncertainty and variability about the role of clinical ethics committees. Even in the USA, their exact role is uncertain. Although we now have a good idea of the mechanisms for ethical...

Research ethics review is an important process, designed to protect participants in medical research. However, it is increasingly criticised for failing to meet its aims. Here, two researchers reflect on their experiences of applying for ethical approval of observational research in clinical settings. They highlight some problems faced by reviewers and researchers and propose a two-stage ethica...

When several decades ago the IRB system was established trying to balance major moral consideration in research with human subjects, the main impetus were severe cases of unethical behaviour and experiences, often protected by state and institutional administration. The first phase of the IRB aimed at protecting subjects from serious hazards, while in later stages the IRB turned to „lesser risk...

Background: Promoting ethics is one of the goals of education, but the free flow of communication and divulging unethical behaviors in e-learning make the urgent need to clarify ethical values. Therefore, the aim of this study was to prepare ethical codes to develop and deliver e-contents.    Methods: A draft of e-content ethical codes was prepared based on the literature review. Then, it was ...

Information technology (IT) allows for large-scale data collection and data analysis, e.g. through logs of user behavior and online surveys. While the issue of structured access to data is extremely important, previous research has not sufficiently emphasized design of data export for research purposes. If researchers are to make their data accessible, they must be empowered to export data in a...

Future personal robots might possess the capability to autonomously generate novel goals that exceed their initial programming as well as their past experience. We discuss the ethical challenges involved in such a scenario, ranging from the construction of ethics into such machines to the standard of ethics we could actually demand from such machines. We argue that we might have to accept those...

Local review of research by ethics committees in the UK has long been held to be an important right of the local research ethics committee and, even with the introduction of the European Clinical Trials Directive, the governance arrangements for research ethics committees continue to allow for local review of multicentre studies. There is no requirement for local review in either the European U...