Heeding calls from the Institute of Medicine, WHO, and the Nordic Trial Alliance, The BMJ are extending their policy on requiring the sharing of individual patient data for trials of drugs or devices. An article published on this policy extension can be found here.

The article concludes: “Making anonymised patient level data from clinical trials available for independent scrutiny allows other researchers to replicate key analyses, reduces the possibility that studies will be unnecessarily duplicated, and maximises use of the information from trials—an important moral obligation to trial participants. An initial investment of time and money is needed to prepare trial data for sharing, but after the first use there are few additional costs; in essence, the value of the data increases with each use.”.