Transparency in clinical trial reporting

Patients, clinicians, regulators, and policy makers rely on clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy and safety of new drugs, vaccines, and devices.1 Since the 1990s, most clinical trials have had industry funders who collaborate with academics for clinical and methodological expertise, recruitment of study participants, and access to scholarly publications.23 More recently, industry has increasingly turned to contract research organizations for efficient oversight of clinical trials. These for-profit entities employ physician-scientists, pharmacists, biostatisticians, managers, and medical writers who take control of the design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of trials.34 This commercialization of the oversight of clinical trials has seen academic physicians shifted to comparatively minor roles.3

In a recent paper in the BMJ (doi:10.1136/bmj.k3654), Rasmussen and colleagues report a cross sectional analysis of 200 phase III and IV trials of vaccines, drugs, and devices published in high impact medical journals between 2014 and 2017 with full industry funding and at …