Wednesday, August 18, 2004

More on public access to drug trial data. Faye Flam, Researchers working for full disclosure of clinical trials, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 17, 2004. Excerpt: "In criminal proceedings in the United States, the prosecution is legally required to provide the defense with any information that might be beneficial to the defendant - even if it may hurt the prosecution's case. Scientists are bound to a similar type of disclosure through an unwritten code of ethics. It's part of what separates real science from pseudo-science or folk wisdom....In many cases, it's not that the journals refuse to publish negative results, [Kay] Dickerson [professor at Brown University] said, but that researchers never write them up or send them to the journals. Sometimes, when researchers try to publish their results, the companies that sponsor them try to intervene....Critics such as [Drummond] Rennie [a deputy editor at JAMA] argue that...voluntary measures won't go far enough. Companies retain the power to stop posting all results once the current controversy dies down." [Open Access News] 8:29:33 AM      Google It!.