Research ethics committees must ensure registration of research and accessibility of results

The Society for Clinical Trials supports United States legislation mandating trials registration

“…Work should begin immediately in the US to implement mechanisms for registration. Ihe most direct way to comprehensively register trials is through research ethics review boards [32,33]. As part of this effort, a unique identifier should be assigned to each trial, as is currently being done by Current Controlled Trials in their meta-Register [34].…”

Registering clinical trials

“…Linking registration to funding is one option, but what about all those trials without an external source of funding? All clinical trials must go through a process of ethical approval, and opinion leaders have suggested that the machinery for this (ethics committees in Britain, institutional review boards in the United States) should be used to guarantee registration 8 9. If research ethics committees policed the system by insisting on registration before granting ethical approval, accrual would leap to almost 100% overnight.…”

Clinical trials in Italy: focus on the protocols submitted to Ethics Committees

“…To date, the majority of the literature on the activity of the LECs has focused on their performance and variability in the procedures adopted by them (1–3, 10, 11). There has been little work on the role of the LECs in monitoring clinical research and collecting information on current clinical trials (12). It is generally accepted that clinical trials should be registered so that essential details are made public from the trial’s inception, rather than from publication many years later (13).…”