Re: Restoring invisible and abandoned trials: a call for people to publish the findings
Publication bias is a serious problem in medical research. BioMed Central, the open-access publisher, is fully committed to supporting and facilitating publication of all trial results in order to complete the scientific record. Many of our journals, including all those in the Medical Evidence Portfolio, actively encourage the publishing of all research results, positive and negative, in addition to trial protocols.
Making the results of all clinical trials accessible to researchers, clinicians and the public not only promotes transparency in clinical research, it also ensures that all the evidence is available for informed clinical decision making. However, actually getting all the results published is quite another thing.
With the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIATs) initiative, Doshi and colleagues have proposed a pragmatic method of getting unpublished, distorted or abandoned trials published. In the article they propose a 12-month ‘grace period’ to allow the original triallists to publish their articles and now, at the halfway point of this period, the Editors-in-Chief of Trials and the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine have written an open-letter in support of the RIAT initiative to almost 200 publications managers in large pharmaceutical companies to encourage them to declare their intent to publish their results. Read the letter here.
Rapid Response:
Re: Restoring invisible and abandoned trials: a call for people to publish the findings
Publication bias is a serious problem in medical research. BioMed Central, the open-access publisher, is fully committed to supporting and facilitating publication of all trial results in order to complete the scientific record. Many of our journals, including all those in the Medical Evidence Portfolio, actively encourage the publishing of all research results, positive and negative, in addition to trial protocols.
Making the results of all clinical trials accessible to researchers, clinicians and the public not only promotes transparency in clinical research, it also ensures that all the evidence is available for informed clinical decision making. However, actually getting all the results published is quite another thing.
With the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIATs) initiative, Doshi and colleagues have proposed a pragmatic method of getting unpublished, distorted or abandoned trials published. In the article they propose a 12-month ‘grace period’ to allow the original triallists to publish their articles and now, at the halfway point of this period, the Editors-in-Chief of Trials and the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine have written an open-letter in support of the RIAT initiative to almost 200 publications managers in large pharmaceutical companies to encourage them to declare their intent to publish their results. Read the letter here.
Competing interests: No competing interests