Wednesday, March 11, 2009

EthicShare - a Virtual Community for Ethics Research and Exchange

During this past weekend, I had the pleasure to attend a session about the web resource "EthicShare" at the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Developed by the University of Minnesota with support from the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation and other partner universities, this virtual community is for scholars working in the field of ethics. The first version of this site will focus specifically on bioethics. The site includes a database of literature on all aspects of bioethics (including quite a bit about the ethics of nanotechnology) and the ability to link directly to the full-text of an article through your university library. The site also includes the ability to tag articles, upload your own papers to the database, and to participate in online discussions about a wide range of ethics issues. At the moment, the number of individuals using the site is rather small, but as the community grows, this could become an extremely rich resource for scholars and students of applied ethics.

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