Open, Online Database Of Clinical Trials Planned

A newly announced project will create an open, online database of information about the clinical research trials worldwide. The initiative, called Open Trials, will be directed by Ben Goldacre, an internationally known author (“Bad Science”) and advocated for clinical transparency.

As announced by Open Knowledge yesterday, Open Trials “will aggregate information from a wide variety of existing sources in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the data and documents related to all trials of medicines and other treatments around the world.” The database is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

“Conducted in partnership with the Center for Open Science and supported by the Center’s Open Science Framework, the project will also track whether essential information about clinical trials is transparent and publicly accessible so as to improve understanding of whether specific treatments are effective and safe,” the announcement said.

“There have been numerous positive statements about the need for greater transparency on information about clinical trials, over many years, but it has been almost impossible to track and audit exactly what is missing,” Goldacre, the project’s chief investigator and a Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said in the announcement. “This project aims to draw together everything that is known around each clinical trial. The end product will provide valuable information for patients, doctors, researchers, and policymakers—not just on individual trials, but also on how whole sectors, researchers, companies, and funders are performing. It will show who is failing to share information appropriately, who is doing well, and how standards can be improved.”

According to the announcement, Open Trials: “will help to automatically identify which trial results have not been disclosed by matching registry data on trials that have been conducted against documents containing trial results. This will facilitate routine public audit of undisclosed results. It will also improve discoverability of other documents around clinical trials, which will be indexed and, in some cases, hosted. Lastly, it will help improve recruitment for clinical trials by making information and commentary on ongoing trials more accessible.”

The first phase of the Open Trials project is scheduled for completion in March 2017. For project updates, please follow @opentrials on Twitter.com.