Results of all clinical trials should be posted within a year, says WHO

The World Health Organization has said that the main findings of clinical trials must be posted to a primary clinical trial registry within 12 months of the end of the study and be published in a peer reviewed journal within 24 months.1

Primary registries are those approved by WHO and include the European Union Clinical Trials Register (EU-CTR) and, in the United States, ClinicalTrials.gov.

WHO’s new position statement not only reaffirms the ethical imperative of clinical trial reporting but also calls for the reporting of results from older but still unpublished trials. It also calls for the inclusion of a trial ID, a clinical trial registry identifier. This means that manuscripts can easily be linked with clinical trial registry entries and will help identify trials that have been conducted but not reported.

Ben Goldacre, a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign (alltrials.net), which has been campaigning for …