Researchers call for clinical trial data to be open source

MEDICAL researchers are calling for all clinical trial information to be openly shared with the entire research community to eliminate bottlenecks and duplication. ‘Despite a rapid increase in the volume of published research, physicians still make decisions without access to the synthesised evidence they need,’ said Adam Dunn, a research fellow with the Australian Institute of Health Innovation at UNSW. In a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Dunn and his co-authors say open access to clinical data could revolutionise the medical research model of silos and protected IP. ‘Clinicial data is a potential goldmine,’ said Enrico Coiera, a co-author on the paper along with Ric Day and Harvard’s Kenneth Mandl. ‘If researchers, doctors and patients were able to reanalyse and pool this data, there would be a hot of questions that could start to be answered. But these meta-analyses are very uncommon because researchers and companies don’t like to share data.’ The paper comes as traditional publishing houses are coming from increasing pressure from governments’ and universities’ increasing endorsements for publicly funded research to be made available on open source platforms. This week alone, the UK government said it had enlisted the services of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to help design a platform to ensure all taxpayer funded research is freely available. Harvard and MIT also announced this week they would jointly invest $US60 million ($58m) in a non-profit open source platform called edX. At a press conference, Harvard president Drew Faust and MIT president Susan Hockfield emphasised that online courses wouldn’t take away from traditional on-campus education. They said one of the goals of edX was to further research on education, such as developing online tools that could be used by on-campus students.”