Non-medical research involves the same issues of justice, beneficence, and respect for persons that apply to non-medical research. It also may involve risk of harm to participants, and conflicts of interest for researchers. It is therefore not possible to argue that such research should be exempt from ethical review. This paper argues that researchers should become more engaged with the ethical issues associated with their research, and that human research ethics committees and other institutional ethical review bodies should be viewed as resources which add value to the research process. To improve ethical review we need this engagement by researchers, and their involvement in the decision-making of ethics review bodies.