Revealing the Rest of the Iceberg: The Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) Support Center & Grant Competitions | Speaking of Medicine

"Peter Doshi and colleagues announce the formation of the RIAT Support Center and grant competitions aimed at facilitating publication of previously misreported and unreported trials.

Biomedical trial literature is and will remain the evidentiary cornerstone of the endeavour to relieve suffering and prevent disease. But we have come to realise that all is not well in the trial garden.  Not all trials conducted are published (invisible trials) and many trials that are published are inaccurately reported (misreported trials). Something must be done to prevent further erosion of this essential literature and bring hidden trial results to the surface. RIAT is an initiative aimed at addressing the problems of trial invisibility and misreporting in biomedical literature.  With increasing access to clinical trial data, third parties that had no involvement in the trial (either as investigators or sponsors) can nonetheless obtain sufficient documentation not only to document trial invisibility or misreporting but also to fix the problem, i.e., “restoring” the trial with a new, correctly/adequately reported publication.  RIAT goes beyond just urging investigators and sponsors to “do the right thing.”  It ups the ante by saying “if you won’t publish (or correct, for misreported trials), we will.” The RIAT initiative believes in “publications with data”, consistent with PLOS’s policy.  While RIAT manuscripts are expected to provide an accurate reporting of a trial, readers should not have to trust the new RIAT publication on blind faith.  The data should be available for anybody to verify the accuracy of what’s reported–whether that’s to spot check or to re-run analyses...."