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The Ethics CORE Digital Library is funded by The National Science Foundation with a mission to bring together information on best practices in research, ethics instruction and responding to ethical problems that arise in research and professional life.
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Ethics CORE will develop, gather, preserve and provide comprehensive access to resources related to professional and research ethics for many audiences. It will provide information and expertise for instructors who teach ethics, students with questions about research integrity, researchers and engineers who encounter ethical challenges in practice, administrators in universities and businesses who oversee ethics and compliance policies, scholars who conduct research on professional and research ethics, and others with questions or interests in these areas using a variety of tools including Online Presentations, Courses, Learning Modules, Animations, Teaching Materials, and more. These resources come from contributors in our scientific community, and are used by visitors from all over the world.

Ethics CORE investigators hail from diverse backgrounds, including business, law, civil engineering, education, electrical and computer engineering and library sciences. Other partners bring strengths across the range of disciplines supported by the National Science Foundation and beyond.

Following the 8th Annual Ethics Conference on The Role of Ethics in Nation Building we now invite you to the 9th Annual Ethics Conference on BIOETHICS (25th - 26th October 2012).

To be held at the Strathmore University Auditorium.

Details on venue, contact person for details and registration are on the website.

We look forward to seeing you at the Conference.
Regards, Ethics Conference Committee Strathmore University

Visit: http://www.strathmore.edu/ethics/speaker and http://www.strathmore.edu/ethics/conference-programme for details.

You may register here: http://www.strathmore.edu/ethics/user/register

A paper was published in September 2012 in BMC Medical Ethics entitled:
A qualitative study using traditional community assemblies to investigate community perspectives on informed consent and research participation in western Kenya

The Abstract reads:
Background: International collaborators face challenges in the design and implementation of ethical biomedical research. Evaluating community understanding of research and processes like informed consent may enable researchers to better protect research participants in a particular setting; however, there exist few studies examining community perspectives in health research, particularly in resource-limited settings, or strategies for engaging the community in research processes. Our goal was to inform ethical research practice in a biomedical research setting in western Kenya and similar resource-limited settings. Methods: We sought to use mabaraza, traditional East African community assemblies, in a qualitative study to understand community perspectives on biomedical research and informed consent within a collaborative, multinational research network in western Kenya. Analyses included manual, progressive coding of transcripts from mabaraza to identify emerging central concepts. Results: Our findings from two mabaraza with 108 community members revealed that, while participants understood some principles of biomedical research, they emphasized perceived benefits from participation in research over potential risks. Many community members equated health research with HIV testing or care, which may be explained in part by the setting of this particular study. In addition to valuing informed consent as understanding and accepting a role in research activities, participants endorsed an increased role for the community in making decisions about research participation, especially in the case of children, through a process of community consent. Conclusions: Our study suggests that international biomedical research must account for community understandings of research and informed consent, particularly when involving children. Moreover, traditional community forums, such as mabaraza in East Africa, can be used effectively to gather these data and may serve as a forum to further engage communities in community consent and other aspects of research.