Where does the information generated by clinical trials go – and who does it benefit? A large percentage of clinical trials do not end up as published research, and are therefore inaccessible to prescribers, patients and the public.

Interest is building for increasing accessibility to clinical trial reports. The AllTrials Initiative has produced a plan of action to log “all [clinical] trials registered and results reported.” Many journals will only publish significant or positive findings from clinical trials; the AllTrials Initiative will encourage repositories to accept, and publishers to consider, the neglected side of clinical research reports. The problem there lies in encouraging researchers to submit these pieces – especially when the trials themselves have been discarded, abandoned or disregarded in favour of more “publishable” work, and when academic journals charge publishing costs for accepted works.

Presented in the British Medical Journal, the 2013 research paper Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) : A Call for People to Publish The Findings uses the metaphor of an iceberg to highlight the problems posed by unpublished data kept “below the waterline.” The authors of the study suggest a kind of open season on unpublished clinical research data, stating that after a one-year grace period in which the authors could publish their work themselves, other researchers should be allowed to step in and publish their own papers using the data.

ecancermedicalscience accepts clinical studies and encourages clinical trials to be registered prior to submission in a suitable publicly accessible registry.