Daniel Engber, Top Medical Journals Make Disclosure of Clinical-Trial Results a Condition of Publication, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Responding to growing concern that drug companies may be concealing unfavorable results of experiments, 11 of the world's top medical-research journals plan to require the disclosure of continuing clinical trials in a public registry. The editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and eight other journals announced jointly on Wednesday that they would publish the results of trials only if the experiments are registered in an online database. Drug companies have been sweeping negative results under the carpet, said Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. 'We believe there needs to be a complete record of what's going on, so it's not a game of research hide-and-seek,' he said. The new guidelines require the registration of all trials in a free online database that includes key information relating to the goal of the study and its expected outcomes. The only database that currently meets those criteria is ClinicalTrials.gov, which is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health." (PS: Kudos to the journals for doing what they can to ensure free online access to critical medical information. The next step is to see that the same principle applies to peer-reviewed research articles.)
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
