Thursday 8 November 2012 21:12 by Edoardo La Sala Globalist syndication
From January 2013, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most authoritative medical journals at an international level, will only publish the results of studies for which the authors undertake to make appropriately anonymous raw data available upon justified request.
open date. From that date we will therefore begin to talk about open data, also with regard to clinical trials or for those decision-making processes with which it is determined which treatment is the best for a given pathology. Open data is the focal point for the success of theopen government, a doctrine that promotes the complete access of citizens to government acts and related data so that the activities of governments and state administrations are open, available, and controllable.
Hidden data. And there seems to be a need for control in this field given that according to Fiona Goodle, the editor of the BMJ, the magazine's new policy was necessary because the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to having discovered medicines that have improved the health or saved the lives of so many people, has also "persistently and systematically covered up and misrepresented to decades of clinical trial data. As a result, a broad spectrum of drugs commonly used in all fields of medicine have been described as safer and more effective than they are, putting people's lives at risk and wasting public money."
Anonymous data. Even before this tough stance GlaxoSmithKline had already announced which would have authorized access to anonymous data of its experiments on the basis of the presentation of a reasonable scientific question, a protocol and the commitment by the researchers to publish their results.
The debate. In the United Kingdom, the issue is causing a debate which is also stimulated by the publication of the new book by the doctor and science communicator Ben GoldacreBen Goldacre "Bad Pharma", ha reached up also the halls of the British Parliament.
The questions. We'll see where all this leads, if and how quickly other players in clinical trials will join this challenging paradigm. Also because there is no shortage of doubts about actual success: if it is true, as the BMJ maintains, that the large pharmaceutical industry has constantly manipulated data in order to sell its products more successfully, why should the same industry now convert to
