Joint symposium on clinical trial registration.

Speakers: C. Haug (Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association) and E. Phimister (Deputy Editor, New England Journal of Medicine)

The interest of the public and the medical profession is better served by the registration of all clinical trials and the results thereof.

Both speakers addressed the steps that editors of medical journals have taken to help to make the above statement a reality although clearly the responsibility extends to governments and regulatory bodies.

Two editorials have been published in the New Journal of Medicine in 2004/2005 on behalf of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. The concern of the editors has shifted to ethical issues including the question: how science should be reported?

It is important that the public gets ‘the full picture’. In order to try to make such information accessible to the public a number of registries have been opened and a large number of journals insist that a trial has been fully registered with a ‘registered’ registry which is available to the public for scrutiny. ClinicalTrials.gov, Controlled-Trials.com and ACTR.org.au are examples. Trial results are not accepted for review by the editors of many medical journals unless they have been registered with the above or other recognized registries.

Questions still to be addressed are first, how to make bodies like the EMEA accessible to the public and second, how to make sure that all trials are registered and the results (negative or positive) made publicly accessible.