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The ethical challenges brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic have further highlighted the need for and the importance of bioethics. 

Wellcome Open Research has launched the Epidemic Ethics Collection and the Global Infectious Disease Ethics (GLIDE) Gateway giving access to bioethics research and voice to scholars in the field.  

Read on to learn more about the field of bioethics and how Wellcome Open Research supports the bioethics research community through their dedicated content hubs. 

The field of bioethics 

What is bioethics? 

Advances in biology, medicine, and technologies are bringing benefits to millions of people. Yet, these same innovations can raise ethical questions about their appropriate use. Bioethics is the multi-disciplinary study of and the response to these moral and ethical questions.   

The field of bioethics emerged in the 1970s. Issues included research with human subjects, genetics, organ transplantation, and/or reproduction. Today, bioethics encompasses much more than medical and research ethics. Environmental, public health, and digital technology ethics are just a few examples.

As technology evolves, and questions involving its implementation become more complex, bioethics will continue to grow and become increasingly important. 

Challenges in the field 

Attention to ethics, infectious disease, and global health has never been more important. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted ethical challenges and inequality on a global scale.  

Profound ethical challenges involve disruption, time pressures, competing lines of accountability, and uncertainty. All these factors add to the risk that ethics may not be effectively embedded into public health policy and practice or research responses.  

In such contexts, important questions about power, inclusion, and social justice arise, including:  

• Which stakeholders’ voices play an active role in decision-making? 
• How can tensions between differing stakeholders’ priorities and interests be addressed? 
• What moral responsibilities arise to mitigate health and social inequities exacerbated by emergencies? 

How can open research support the bioethics research community?  

Open research

When it comes to accessing academic journal literature, researchers can face significant challenges. Traditional journals often charge a fee to access research articles. This poses a barrier, especially for authors in low- and middle-income countries, and early career scholars.

The growth of open access publications has been a major step toward addressing this issue. Thanks to open research, the bioethics research community can have immediate access to relevant research, expertise, and resources. This, in turn, can help inform responses related to ethical issues arising from public health emergencies in real-time. 

Dedicated content hubs on Wellcome Open Research

Wellcome Open Research recognizes the importance of the field of bioethics and its associated challenges. The Platform offers two content hubs dedicated to bioethics and led by expert advisors: the Epidemic Ethics Collection and the GLIDE Gateway. 

Global Infectious Disease Ethics (GLIDE) Gateway 

The organization behind the Gateway 

Predating the COVID-19 pandemic, bioethics colleagues from the University of Oxford and Johns Hopkins University realized the value that collaboration could add to analyzing ethical issues related to infectious disease research. Together, they established the Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics (GLIDE) Collaborative. GLIDE brings together scholars, trainees, and partners from around the world to undertake responsive research on pressing issues and forward-looking projects with longer timeframes.

The Gateway

The GLIDE Gateway represents a timely and critically important new hub for publishing open access, peer-reviewed articles focusing on ethics, infectious disease, and global health. 

Researchers who have received funding from GLIDE or other Wellcome mechanisms can publish their work in the Gateway rapidly and easily.  

The Gateway aims to provide a flexible collaborative platform for identifying and analyzing ethical issues arising in infectious disease treatment, research, response, and preparedness, through the lens of global health ethics. It serves as an inclusive space for diverse global perspectives, with particular attention to including the voices of researchers at all career stages. 

Epidemic Ethics Collection  

The organization behind the Collection 

Epidemic Ethics is a global community of bioethicists and stakeholders who are involved in public health and research responses to public health emergencies. Epidemic Ethics is led by the World Health Organization and is supported by key partners including the Fogarty International Center, Global Forum on Bioethics in Research, Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Bioethics, Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics (GLIDE) Collaborative, and Wellcome. 

About the Collection 

The Epidemic Ethics Collection brings together timely and insightful research on ethical issues in public health and research responses to health emergencies, with an initial focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. The Collection addresses the need for support and resources required to identify and analyze ethical issues, and to better understand the context in which they arise. 

This dedicated content hub welcomes different research formats and outputs including Open Letters, opinion pieces, literature reviews, policy and conceptual analysis, and empirical, normative, and policy research.

Examples of impactful research hosted within these content hubs include: 

• An Open Letter by Jamrozik et al. which explored the ethical implications of vaccine-enhanced disease (VED) and summarized the four known cases in humans. To this date, this paper has over 6,300 views and 260 downloads. 
• An Open Letter by Smith et al. in which a group of 17 experts in bioethics highlighted five key ethical lessons from the initial experience with COVID-19. This paper currently has over 6,600 views and 500 downloads. 

Interested in learning more? Start exploring the Epidemics Ethics Collection and the GLIDE Gateway today. 

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Full list of authors and contributors

Jeffrey Kahn – Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, USA

Joseph Ali – Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, USA

Katherine Littler – World Health Organization, Switzerland

Maxwell Smith – School of Health Studies, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Michael Parker – The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK

Patricia Kingori – The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK

Susan Bull – The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK & University of Auckland, New Zealand