Unclear on the concept
The whole point of the Alltrials.net campaign is to prevent selective publication of clinical trial results. The problem is that drug companies (and everyone else) publish only about half of their trials and are more likely to publish results if they are positive, distorting the available evidence. The only fix is not to let them be selective.
Roche has responded to the campaign by saying it will set up a panel to approve requests for access to anonymised patient data. That’s nice, and it will be helpful for certain types of research, but it completely misses the point of the AllTrials campaign.
As Tracey Brown, of the British organisation Sense about Science, comments: “Which bit of All and Trials do they not understand?”
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
My only worry is that an obligation to publish means that somebody has an obligation to accept the (possibly very badly done) paper. I wonder if a technical report will do?
The sympathetic view of Roche is that they are letting people who care deeply about having all trial published volunteer the time and effort to make the trial reports publishable. More nefarious than lacking understanding.
12 years ago
A technical report will definitely do. GSK, who were the first pharmaceutical company to sign on, are just going to put all the summary data on their website.
12 years ago
And speaking of being “unclear on the concept”, sorry for missing the surname requirement on the previous comment.
But knowing that a summary of data on website is enough to be compliant, that does make Roche’s position rather . . . odd.
12 years ago