Workshop "Tools to improve the transparency of clinical trials"

The Dashboard shows for each German medical school how their clinical trials perform with regard to different indicators of transparency. These indicators include, for example, prospective registration, timely publication of results or the open access status of results publications. The dashboard takes into account interventional clinical trials that are registered with ClinicalTrials.gov or the German Clinical Trials Registry (DRKS) and, according to the trial registry, were completed between 2009 and 2017. The dashboard with all relevant information can be found at https://quest-cttd.bihealth.org/#tabStart.

The Report Cards bring together the information from the dashboard for a specific clinical trial. They thus provide direct feedback to the individual study lead on which transparency criteria his/her study fulfils. In addition, the Report Cards provide guidance on how transparency can be improved after the study is completed or in the future. An example of this is the link from the publication of results in the study register. The Report Cards can be generated automatically for a selection of clinical trials. We have piloted the Report Cards at the Charité. Further information on the Report Cards can be found at https://osf.io/xq46s.

In the workshop, we would like to discuss how these two tools can be optimally used, how they can be further improved and which additional measures could help to improve the transparency of clinical trials.