A Call for Open Access and Empathy Is Not Enough: Hands on Are Needed!: The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol 17, No 10

Abstract:  Chattopadhyay and colleagues (2017) call for inclusive access to bioethics journals and global participation in the bioethics discourse. They argue that the understanding of global bioethics may be misleading. If only people from one (small) part of the world publish in bioethics journals, global bioethics is not representative. We absolutely support their call to develop the field of bioethics by reducing journal payment-barriers and emphasizing empirical ethics, analysis, and theoretical perspectives from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). But, based on our experiences from research, teaching, and capacity building in bioethics in Ethiopia, we find that access alone has less impact when not reinforced by close collaborations between high- and low-income colleagues and essential capacity building in bioethics among students, clinicians, and academic staff in the LMIC.