From Pacific Standard: The U.S. government has never penalized anyone for breaking a law that requires institutions to report the results of clinical trials. A new website, TrialTracker, will list the universities, pharmaceutical companies, and government institutes that ignore this law.
“‘Public accountability is a vitally important tool in public policy, and in improving standards. Public accountability is the reason why many states and countries require restaurants to publish their “hygiene ratings” on the front door,’ Ben Goldacre, a physician and health-data researcher at the University of Oxford and the website’s lead creator, writes in an email. In addition to embarrassing institutions who are late in posting their results to ClinicalTrials.gov as required, Goldacre hopes charities and other groups that fund trials will look at the site—called TrialTracker—and put pressure on the teams they support. Lastly, an open-data advocacy group that Goldacre founded, AllTrials, will be sending the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a weekly list of late reporters. ‘We also hope our public tool will help encourage the FDA to enforce the law,’ he writes.”
