Data Sharing Should Be In Everyone’s Interest

One of the most important developments in medicine has been an increasing push for transparency about clinical trials and their underlying data. Among many examples, the National Institutes of Health are about to issue a new rule mandating greater disclosure of clinical trial results, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering ways to allow greater access to the clinical trial data it possesses. And in a surprise announcement on January 20, 2016, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors—representing all the top medical journals in the world—issued a joint proposal to require any authors of clinical trial reports to share the individual patient data “no later than 6 months after publication.” That announcement, however, was followed the next day by an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that took a much more jaded view of data sharing. In the editorial, NEJM editors Jeffrey Drazen and Dan Longo said that while data sharing was a “moral imperative,” they were worried about how data sharing might play out. Most controversially, they suggested that with more data sharing, a “new class of research person will merge,” namely, so-called “research parasites” who either steal “from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers” or “use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited.” They concluded that data sharing works “best” when other scholars develop novel ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Drugs and Medical Technology Featured Health Professionals clinical trials data sharing Research Source Type: blogs