Completed our Clinical Trials Day Quiz? Read about what's next for clinical trial reporting - On Medicine

"The reproducibility crisis has bought many of the issues with science to the forefront of our attentions, and with recent estimates that 85% of research is wasted there is a clear need for change. Many of the next steps for clinical trials will have these issues incorporated at their heart.

For clinical trial reporting, one of the next big things will involve data sharing. In January 2016, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) announced a proposal for sharing clinical trial data, calling for feedback from all stakeholders (similar to the trial registration call back in 2004 – Question 1 in the Clinical Trials Day Quiz). They were inundated with responses (including ours from Springer Nature) and over a year later we are still waiting for the next draft, indicating the complexity of the data sharing. I’m predicting the debate around how best to proceed will be pretty hot.

Online publication and open science have helped establish an exciting landscape for publishing and reporting. We are looking forward to what the next years will bring for clinical trial reporting and can only begin to imagine what it will look like in another 270 years…"