About Ivan Oransky, M.D.
Ivan Oransky, M.D., president of AHCJ's board of directors, is vice president, editorial, at Medscape and a Distinguished Writer In Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He blogs at Embargo Watch and at Retraction Watch. Follow him at @IvanOransky.
Medical reporters are likely familiar with ClinicalTrials.gov, the U.S. government-run registry of clinical trials. The site became available in 2000, three years after Congress passed the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 (FDAMA), which, as the site notes,
required the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through NIH, to establish a registry of clinical trials information for both federally and privately funded trials conducted under investigational new drug applications (IND) to test the effectiveness of experimental drugs for serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions.
The site – and others around the world – really took off in 2005 after the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors began requiring that researchers register their trials when they started if they wanted to publish the results. Publishing in the peer-reviewed literature is the coin of the realm in academia and also vital for FDA approval, so the carrot worked, according to a 2007 update:
Before the ICMJE policy, ClinicalTrials.gov, the largest trial registry at the time, contained 13 153 trials; this number climbed to 22 714 one month after the policy went into effect (3). In April 2007, the registry contained over 40 000 trials, with more than 200 new trial registrations occurring weekly (Zarin D. Personal communication).
Registration of a trial’s plans – what researchers plan to test, and how – also means there’s a pixel trail if reporters, or any member of the public, wants to see if scientists changed the goalposts to make their results look better, or buried negative results. (Also see Ghost protocols: Scientists propose a way to plug major holes in the medical literature)
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