Restoring invisible and abandoned trials: a call for people to publish the findings

thousands of pages of trial reports in the public domain. Other trial reports, such as for oseltami‐ vir and clopidogrel, were obtained through new freedom of information policies at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) that have revolution‐ ised the public’s ability to access trial data. The documents are a substantial resource of information about trials. We expect that other independent groups will also have access to many additional trial reports. The documents we have obtained include trial reports for studies that remain unpublished years after completion (such as Roche’s study M76001, the largest treatment trial of oseltamivir, and Pfizer’s study A945‐1008, the largest trial of gabapentin for painful diabetic neuropathy). We also have thousands of pages of clinical study reports associated with trials that have been pub‐ lished in scientific journals but shown to con‐ tain inaccuracies, such as Roche’s oseltamivir study WV15671, GlaxoSmithKline’s paroxetine study 329, and Pfizer’s gabapentin study 945‐ 291. 12 24 25 We consider these to be examples of abandoned trials: either unpublished trials for which sponsors are no longer actively working to publish or published trials that are documented as misreported but for which authors do not cor‐ rect the record using established means such as a correction or retraction (which is an aban‐ donment of responsibility) (box 1, bmj.com). Because abandonment can lead to false conclu‐ sions about effectiveness and safety, we believe that it should be tackled through independent publication and republication of trials.