The commercialization of ethics: When moral gatekeeping becomes a profitable enterprise
In recent years, a troubling paradox has emerged in Philippine academia: the very mechanisms designed to safeguard ethical research have themselves become lucrative commercial ventures. Across various institutions and agencies, ethics review services are now marketed with promises of “fast turnaround time” and membership discounts—language that echoes promotional brochures rather than solemn commitments to scholarly integrity.
This creeping commercialization of ethics review raises profound questions: Can ethics itself remain ethical when it becomes a business? And what does this profit-driven model mean for social justice and research publication, especially for those whose work seeks to amplify the voices of the marginalized?
The transformation of ethics review into a profitable enterprise is unmistakable. Many ethics review bodies now charge substantial fees for clearance applications, often requiring a non-refundable application fee that matches the basic review charge.
Training workshops are frequently priced at thousands of pesos per participant for short sessions, with value-added tax added to all review fees. These are not incidental administrative costs; they represent a deliberate revenue model. The problem extends across the sector.
A recent analysis observed that “the requirement for ethical reviews has engendered their commercialization, charging exorbitant fees that have to be included in research budgets.” Research involving Indigenous peoples can cost around P50,000, on top of other consent requirements.
This is a stark irony: research that aims to document and respect Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) is often burdened by the very ethical apparatus meant to protect those communities, transforming guardianship into a financial gatekeeper. The message is clear: ethics has a price tag, and not everyone can afford it.
The lengthy and expensive process of obtaining ethics clearance from an accredited Institutional Review Board (IRB) becomes even more burdensome and paradoxical when applied to Indigenous research, particularly in geographically isolated and culturally rich areas like Tawi-Tawi, where the majority of the population belongs to Indigenous communities.
Navigating this process is not merely a matter of paying the exorbitant fees; it involves a protracted timeline that often stretches for months due to the need for multiple layers of consent from local government units and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) to community elders and traditional leaders.
Researchers must allocate substantial budgets for travel to remote islands, hiring cultural translators, and conducting multiple community consultations to build trust and secure genuine Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC). This prolonged and costly engagement, while ethically necessary, creates a significant tension with the current mandate for research productivity, which pressures academics to produce rapid, quantifiable outputs for international publication.
Meanwhile, internationalization demands that research be competitive and aligned with global standards, yet these very standards often fail to account for the intricate, time-consuming, and expensive realities of working with Indigenous populations. The result is a punishing paradox: researchers are financially and logistically penalized for engaging in the very kind of culturally grounded, justice-oriented work that the ethics system claims to protect, creating a system where the drive for international visibility inadvertently discourages deep, meaningful scholarship with Indigenous communities, ultimately prioritizing publishable metrics over the preservation of knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply accessed.
Ethics review bodies often espouse principles like “social justice" and “protection of vulnerable populations." Yet a fee-based model inherently undermines these principles. Social justice in research ethics requires that all researchers, regardless of institutional affiliation or personal resources, have equitable access to ethical review.
When ethics review becomes a paid service, it commodities what should be a public good. The researchers in the humanities and social sciences frequently see these procedures as difficult, and delays can occur because of bottlenecks in the manual review process. Rather than addressing these bottlenecks through institutional investment, the commercial model simply passes the cost, and the burden to researchers.
Furthermore, the pressure to publish, intensified by CHEd Memorandum Order 21 s.2025's requirement for graduate students to publish in peer-reviewed journals, creates a captive market for ethics review services.
Students who need ethics clearance to publish have no choice but to pay, even when their research poses minimal risk. This is not a free market; it is a regulatory monopoly with a price tag, and it quietly filters whose knowledge is deemed legitimate enough to enter the scholarly record. For a graduate student from a low-income family conducting a qualitative study on urban poverty, a five-figure review fee might mean choosing between ethics clearance and daily subsistence, forcing ethically motivated research into an impossible corner.
Several factors have contributed to this ethical erosion. First, the proliferation of mandates without corresponding institutional support. The CHEd Memo Order No. CMO 21 s. 2025 requires publication but does not provide the infrastructure for efficient ethics review. Higher education institutions struggle with the ratio of reviewers and the number of research per semester, leading to waits of two or three months before receiving ethical clearance.
Into this vacuum stepped commercial providers, presenting themselves as saviors while reinforcing a system that penalizes the underfunded. Second, the conflation of ethics review with bureaucratic compliance rather than genuine ethical education. Many commercial entities offer training on ethics review for institutions intending to set up their own Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), but training future reviewers is a different matter from charging researchers for clearance. When ethics becomes a box to tick and a fee to pay, the reflective dialogue that characterizes true ethical scholarship is replaced by a transaction.
Third, the normalization of fees in what should be a collegial service. Fee schedules and application processes that require payment before review treat ethics clearance as a transaction rather than a process of scholarly improvement, subtly conditioning researchers to view ethics as an external hurdle rather than an internal compass. Fourth, the absence of a unified, publicly funded alternative.
Republic Act No. 10532, the only law governing research ethics review, only applies to health-related research. Non-health social science research exists in a regulatory gray area, creating space for commercial entities to fill the gap without the accountability that a public system would demand. This legislative silence has effectively privatized ethics oversight in the social sciences, leaving the most vulnerable researchers to bear the cost.
Each higher education institution should have an IRB with ample expert reviewers, streamline clear criteria, guidelines, and submission processes, and set a reasonable time frame of four to six weeks. These are sensible, implementable reforms, but they require institutional commitment and funding, not commercialization.
The importance of ethical considerations in publishing, including avoiding duplicate publications, guaranteeing authorship transparency, and declaring conflicts of interest. These principles should apply to ethics review bodies themselves. Transparency about fees, conflicts of interest, and the true cost of review is essential. For social justice to be served, ethics review must be accessible.
This means public funding for ethics review infrastructure in higher education institutions, sliding-scale fees based on researcher resources, pro bono review for unfunded student research, and recognition that ethics education, not just ethics clearance, is the goal. It also calls for a national conversation about whether a system that charges the most for research involving Indigenous peoples can ever truly honor the principle of protecting vulnerable populations or whether it merely monetizes their histories.
When ethics review becomes a business, we risk creating a system where ethical research is a privilege of the well-funded rather than a right of all scholars. The commercial fee-based model, however, professionally administered, fundamentally contradicts the principles of social justice and equitable access that ethics review purports to uphold. Strengthening IRBs will lead to high-quality research production and publication as mandated by CMO No.15 s. 2019, and now CMO No.21 s.2025.
But high-quality research requires not just review, but genuine ethical reflection, something that cannot be bought or sold. If we have commodified ethics, we have already failed the very principles we seek to protect. The question is not whether ethics review can be a business, but whether we can afford to let it become one. In a country where so much social science research is dedicated to understanding inequality, the price of ethical approval must never become yet another measure of that inequality.
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Nilo Jayoma Castulo ([email protected]) is a professor at the Department of Educational Leadership and Professional Services, College of Education, Mindanao State University - Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography. Arlyne C Marasigan ([email protected]) is a professor at the College of Advanced Studies and a fellow at Educational Policy Research and Development Office (EPRDO). Jayson L de Vera ([email protected]) is an associate professor at the Faculty of Science, Technology, and Mathematics. Ma. Laarni D. Buenaventura ([email protected]) is an associate professor at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences and a licensed guidance counselor. John Michael Aquino ([email protected]) is an assistant professor at the College of Teacher Education, Laguna State Polytechnic University, Laguna, Philippines. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Philippine Normal University.
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