Jeffrey Kahn, director and professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics recently announced the beta release of a new tool for bioethics research and collaboration. EthicShare (www.ethicshare.org) is a new way to search for and access bioethics research materials and a space for scholars to collaborate, and it’s now ready for our community to use and explore.

The searchable database is unique in that it pulls together relevant records for scholarly articles, books, and popular press literature. EthicShare content is drawn from the world’s premiere sources, including PubMed, WorldCat, and major news sources. Soon, we will expand the content to include commission reports, dissertations, images and text from digital collections, as well as blogs and more. The records are fully searchable, and when available from your institution, the full text can be downloaded using the Find-It feature.

The initial focus of the EthicShare collection is bioethics, but the collection will continue to grow with the goal of becoming a comprehensive collection of high quality materials in the topic areas of practical and applied ethics. EthicShare has been designed to address the needs of interdisciplinary ethics scholars, specifically giving you the ability to organize your research materials, share them with colleagues, and discuss current topics or resources.

The design of the site has been driven by input from over 200 scholars from the fields of bioethics and other applied ethics disciplines. Now you’re encouraged to try the site and offer ways to improve it.

To visit EthicShare, got to www.ethicshare.org; by registering for an account you will not only have access to full text of materials subscribed to by your institution, but be able to create groups, organize folders, and more. However you use EthicShare’s features, we’d appreciate your feedback. If you have ideas about possibilities for future features and tools, please contact Jeffrey Kahn or the project director, Kate McCready.

The planning and development of EthicShare has been generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the University of Minnesota and the National Science Foundation. Partners from the following institutions have helped plan and govern this project: Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; Indiana University – Bloomington; University of Virginia; Stanford University; University of Mississippi; Georgetown University (planning and use of the Bioethics Thesaurus); and the Council on Library and Information Resources.