EthicShare aims to collect materials from across the broad field of bioethics and related areas. Research literature is the primary focus of the collection’s development, along with appropriate supporting materials from places such as the news, government reports, and blogs. The EthicShare database consists of citation level data and, when possible, links to the freely available or appropriately licensed full text. Records for materials are harvested from a variety of sources for inclusion in the EthicShare database, including, but not limited to, PubMed, OCLC, and news sources.  EthicShare also welcomes contributions from users that fit the collection’s scope. To submit citation information to the EthicShare database, go to http://ethicshare.org/share.  In the future the EthicShare collection also aims to expand to include relevant materials such as syllabi, lectures, and conference proceedings and from resources such as OAISTER.ORG and JSTOR.

In order to harvest relevant, targeted bibliographic data from a variety of sources, we craft tailored search strategies for every data source. All search strategies cover the same range of subjects related to bioethics and closely related fields (however, each data provider requires different formats and configurations for back-end searching and harvesting).  The search strategies created for identifying content must fit the EthicShare user requirements for the collection: high quality, relevant, and accessible.  With these requirements in mind, we collect materials in all major topic areas of bioethics, with ongoing input from the user community.  Our strategies are also informed through consulting with relevant bioethics subject lists (e.g., the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature’s Thesaurus).  The overall collection development policy has remained flexible, and the strategies have undergone multiple revisions as new data sources are added and the scope of the field evolves.

Major areas of the collection targeted by the search strategies currently include:

• Abortion
• Animal Experimentation and Rights
• Bias & Prejudice
• Children
• Clinical Care
• Cloning
• Death & Dying
• Disabled or Mentally Ill
• Ethical Theory
• Genetics
• Genocide
• Health Care
• Human Rights
• Legislation & Jurisprudence
• Life
• Patents in Research and Medicine
• Patient Rights & Privacy
• Public Health
• Quarantine
• Religion
• Reproduction
• Research
• Stem Cells
• Tissue & Organ Donation
• Vaccines
• War, Terrorism & Disasters

As they fall soundly within the policy outlined above, EthicShare collects and indexes the complete contents of the following bioethics journals:

The EthicShare site seeks to serve a broad audience, including academics at colleges and universities, as well as educators and students at secondary and elementary schools. EthicShare is also a resource for health care professionals, policy makers, journalists, and bioethicists.  The collection has been developed with attempts to keep the needs of all of these users in mind.

Currently, the formats of the vast majority of EthicShare materials are journal articles, news articles, and books.  However, additional formats such as audio and visual files can and would be accepted, if they also meet the requirements in scope and quality outlined above.  EthicShare also collects items in all languages, although English language materials are predominate given the sources from which we collect.

Occasionally, items that fall outside of the scope of the EthicShare collection are harvested from our numerous sources.  This is the result of the EthicShare Collections Team’s decision to create search strategies that are more inclusive rather than risk creating strategies that exclude relevant materials.  In these cases, the EthicShare team reserves the right to remove items from the collection that are deemed to be of low quality or out of scope.  EthicShare users can also request that irrelevant materials be removed by sending the citation information or the url(s) to help@ethicshare.org.

With respect to intellectual property, copyright law, and licensing policy, EthicShare is in the process of developing procedures to determine the source and conditions of use for full text content added to EthicShare’s database, especially in the case of user‐contributed materials. We will also determine processes for implementation and removal of content when necessary, and calculate risk based on fair use precedents and principles of open access and advancing scholarship.