Give the Data to the People - NYTimes.com

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-02-03

Summary:

"LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review. This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny. Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released. Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available ..."

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/opinion/give-the-data-to-the-people.html?_r=0

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.data oa.clinical_trials oa.yale.u oa.yoda oa.johnson&johnson oa.medicine oa.biomedicine oa.pharma

Date tagged:

02/03/2014, 17:01

Date published:

02/03/2014, 12:01