Welcome to the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science

Our mission is to provide engineers, scientists, and science and engineering students with resources for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems that arise in their work, and to serve those who are promoting learning and advancing the understanding of responsible research and practice in science and engineering.

Announcing the new OEC at the NAE

The OEC is now an activity of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) as part of its new Center for Engineering Ethics, which started up in April 2007. The new OEC at the NAE site will be appearing soon. The full name is being shortened to the Online Ethics Center for Engineering, but you can continue to call us by our short acronym, OEC . The front page of the NAE OEC will still come up at the URL www.onlineethics.org, but in part because the NAE OEC is a content management system, the URLs for internal pages will change. The search function will help you find any page whose location is not obvious. Until mid-May the old familiar version will continue to be available at http://temp.onlineethics.org for the sake of those who need it to finish the semester, and to provide a backup of our content in case of bugs in the content management system or the OEC's conversion to it. However in place of URLs of the form "www.onlineethics.org/blahblah" you will need to use a URL of the form TEMP.onlineethics.org/blahblah or temp.onlineethics.org/blahblah to get to the old familiar site.

Check our Moving News page for updates.

In its new incarnation the OEC will continue to be an W3C/WAI accessible site, and most sections will continue, except for the Ethics Help-line. That Help-line will be replaced by a (moderated) Case Discussion Forum, which will serve many of the same functions but will gather appropriate advice from users to anonymized cases, also submitted by users and the case and advice will be posted for all to see, thus furthering the educational function of this feature. This discussion form will be up by the end of April and until that time the Ethics Help-line will continue in its current format on the familiar site available at http://temp.onlineethics.org. Furthermore, thanks to Andrew Penry, Andrew Roksandic, Toni Thayer, and Laura Simna, the new NAE OEC will have a capacity for distributed content creation (content creation at many campuses). More information about that will be available from the NAE Engineering Ethics Center. Of course conceptually, the Online Ethics Center has no physical locale: it exists just as much in Europe as it does in America. Cyberspace allows one to transcend space and time.

Harry E. Bovay; Jr., President of Mid-South Telecommunications Company contributed funds for transition to NAE and continuing core support.

Upcoming Conferences

Conferences and calls for papers related to Science and Engineering Ethics.

Contents of the Online Ethics Center (OEC): Annotated list of the main sections of the OEC
General guide to the materials and structure of the OEC: An explanation of the purpose and function of the OEC.
ABET Readiness Committee handbook: A response to brief guide to help prepare the engineering faculty of Case Western Reserve University to address ethical issues in their teaching.
Undergraduate Education in Practical Ethics: A teaching plan with sample assignments for engineering students from the OEC.
Ethics Help-Line: The Help-Line, provides advice for engineers, scientists, and trainees encountering ethical problems in their work and to assist scientists and engineers in maintaining high ethical standards and in acting wisely when confronted with multiple and potentially conflicting responsibilities, even where this may lead to conflicts with organizational superiors. We do not conduct investigations.

Contents of the Online Ethics Center:

Engineering Practice: Many cases, discussions, and ethical guidelines that on the professional responsibilities of engineers, including discussion cases based on those from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review
Research Ethics: Along with many reference materials, this section includes materials original to the Online Ethics Center such as Group Mentoring for the Responsible Research Conduct a modular sequence of materials on the responsible conduct of research that foster group mentoring in responsible research conduct within departments or labs. The method for Group Mentoring is described in "Beyond Adversarial Ethics: Web Resources for Solving Problems About Research Conduct". The collection of cases from the APPE's five volumes, collection of cases for medical school settings, and many relevant reports from the recent National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) are also available here.
Diversity: Studies on gender or ethnicity, statistics on women and minorities, mentoring of new faculty, women in the national academy of engineering, and points to other resources on women and minorities including actual cases
Moral Leaders: Detailed hypermedia cases in which engineers or scientists showed exemplary behavior in fulfilling their professional responsibilities or in acting for the public good
Computers and Software: Cases, discussions, and ethical guidelines bearing on the professional responsibilities of computer scientists, computer engineers, and software designers and engineers
Natural Sciences: Cases, discussions, and ethical guidelines bearing on the professional responsibilities of scientists and engineers in biology, genetics, chemistry, and other sciences.

Subsidiary Sections

Codes of Ethics: A sampling of guidelines and codes of ethics from scientific and engineering professional societies from several countries. Some are also available in Spanish
Bibliography: on Ethics in Engineering and Science.
Glossary: of terms used on the Online Ethics Center.
Organizations: Guide to Acronyms and Abbreviations
About Us: Information about the team that makes up the Online Ethics Center.
Cite OEC, Link to OEC, Submit your link to OEC: Instructions on citing material from the Online Ethics Center (or other web sources) and on linking to the OEC pages, as well as how to submit a link to your website for inclusion on the OEC links to other sites.
The Center for Professional Ethics at Case: Established in 1980 "to provide opportunities for students, faculty, administrators and professionals to explore more fully the foundations of personal and professional ethics."
Case Center for Biomedical Ethics: Established in 1987 to improve public and professional understanding of the ethical issues involved in health sciences research, health care delivery, and health policy development.
Links to Other Ethics Web Sites: Other sites about Engineering and Science Ethics.
Topics Index: A list of major topics in science and engineering ethics with links to our pages that address those topics, many of which contain a brief guide to the literature on those topics.
Spanish Index: A selection of cases, essays and codes of ethics originally in Spanish and/or translated from our English pages.

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