unfortunately closed access
The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a venerable American institution that seeks to provide authoritative recommendations to decision makers and the public, released a report last month on Sharing Clinical Trial Data.1 The report is a welcome codification of guiding principles and frameworks. It reinforces many arguments for data sharing and urges that stakeholders “should foster a culture in which data sharing is the expected norm.” The IOM joins many other organizations, including drug companies, the European Medicines Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in making clear that study reporting and data sharing in medical research are imperative and the questions ahead are how, not whether.
