An association of medical journal editors has proposed that medical researchers share their clinical study data as a condition of publishing articles about their results in medical journals. So far, when a journal has attempted to make this a requirement, medical researchers could decide to publish their results in a different publication that did not have that requirement. Control over the data ensures that only the researchers involved in the studies publish articles based on the data they’ve worked to collect. Requiring researchers to make their data public would make the data–and the researchers’ conclusions–subject to scrutiny by other researchers, facilitating reanalysis and replication of the studies.
Read the data sharing proposal: “Sharing clinical trial data: A proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors” (available January 26, 2016 in Annals of Internal Medicine and several other medical journals).
The International Committee of Medical Journal
Editors (ICMJE) believes that there is an ethical ob-
ligation to responsibly share data generated by inter-
ventional clinical trials because participants have put
themselves at risk. In a growing consensus, many
funders around the world—foundations, government
agencies, and industry—now mandate data sharing.
Here we outline ICMJE’s proposed requirements to
help meet this obligation. We encourage feedback on
the proposed requirements. Anyone can provide feed-
back at www.icmje.org by 18 April 2016.
Feedback on the proposal is to be posted at www.icmje.org by April 18, 2016, and you can read (see feedback already posted) there too.
See also a blog entry at the National Public Radio web site, “Journal editors to researchers: Show everyone your clinical data” and listen to the author of the posting, Harlan Krumholz, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine (Cardiology), being interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition show (January 26, 2016).
