The yearly meeting of the Ethics Committees of the Spanish universities was held in November 2005. This edition, held at the Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Madrid, helped consolidate these meetings (four already: Sitges 2002, Murcia 2003, Granada 2004 and Madrid 2005). Again, the Esteve Foundation contributed to this initiative, ultimately intended to share experiences and unify criteria among these university entities. The present edition focused on university training and work procedures, as well as ethical and social communication and diffusion of research.

The two meetings were inaugurated with the lecture ‘A Brief Dictionary for a Research Ethics Committee’, given by professor of metaphysics Ángel Gabilondo. Submissions and round tables allowed discussing topics such as research involving humans, personal data protection, or animal experimentation, as well as other issues relating to scientific communication, such as how the ethical compromise of research, and also media ethics, are communicated to society.

These meetings were prompted in 2002 by the Ethics Committee of the University of Barcelona, with the objective of sharing the experiences of the different university ethics committees. With that purpose in mind, these meetings have gathered a wide range of people directly or indirectly involved in these committees, such as university specialist professors, accredited technicians, scholars, patients, etc. Three years later, these yearly meetings appear to have taken root.