GLIDE Project Launches Gateway Providing Access to Infectious Disease Ethics Research
Bioethics experts from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Oxford have collaborated with Wellcome Open Research to launch the Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE) Gateway, a timely and critically important new hub for publishing open access, peer-reviewed articles focusing on ethics, infectious disease, and global health.
“The Gateway will enhance GLIDE’s capacity 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,” said Jeffrey Kahn, Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Predating the COVID-19 pandemic, bioethics colleagues from the Berman Institute and the Ethox Centre/Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford 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 Collaborative (GLIDE), funded by a Wellcome Humanitites and Social Science Awardbringing 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’s launch was announced during the opening remarks of “From Crisis to Wellbeing: Recognizing the Power and Potential of Global Health Ethics,” a GLIDE conference focused on advancing knowledge and capacity in global health ethics, exploring societal wellbeing and unity at the heart of global health ethics.
“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,” said Michael Parker, Ethox Cetnre Director.
“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.”
The GLIDE Gateway welcomes different research formats and outputs including Open Letters, opinion pieces, literature reviews, policy and conceptual analysis, empirical, normative, and policy research. An example of the impactful research hosted there include 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.
The GLIDE Gateway launched in tandem with another Wellcome Open Research content hub dedicated to bioethics, the Epidemic Ethics Collection. Epidemic Ethics is a global community of bioethicists and stakeholders who are involved in public health and research responses to public health emergencies. Both portals welcome submissions from Wellcome Trust funded researchers.