WIKIMEDIA, NASA ICEA new database aims to lift the veil on clinical trials, giving the broader public access to information surrounding such research. OpenTrials.net, which launched in beta this week (October 10), is essentially a search engine with which users can comb the world of clinical research to find published results, press releases, patient consent forms, and trial protocols for thousands of past and current clinical trials, pulling information from existing databases, such as the US government’s clinicaltrials.gov and the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, along with drug company databases, regulatory documents, academic journals, and other sources.
“There have been numerous positive statements about the need for greater transparency on information about clinical trials, over many years, but it has been almost impossible to track and audit exactly what is missing, or easily identify discrepancies in information about trials,” Ben Goldacre, the project’s chief...
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