The Cochrane Collaboration joins AllTrials core group
The Cochrane Collaboration has become one of the core organisations in the AllTrials campaign, joining Sense about Science, BMJ, James Lind Initiative, Ben Goldacre and the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. The Cochrane Collaboration is an international network of more than 28,000 scientists, researchers, health policy makers and consumer advocates in 120 countries who contribute their time and expertise to gather, assess and synthesis research to produce systematic reviews of evidence for treatments. These Cochrane Reviews are highly regarded by policy makers, medical professionals and patients to help them make informed and effective choices. The Cochrane reviewers rely on access to all available data on a treatment to compile rigorous reviews.
Mark Wilson, Chief Executive Officer of The Cochrane Collaboration said, “Patients around the world are being harmed because clinical decisions on their healthcare are skewed by the absence of clinical trials data. For 20 years the Cochrane Collaboration has been working to give clinicians, researchers and patients the best possible evidence-based information to help them make informed decisions, and it is a scandal that we still do not have access to all trials data so that we can be confident in our conclusions. Already many of Cochrane’s thousands of contributors and supporters worldwide have signed the AllTrials petition; I am therefore delighted to formalize the organization’s support for the AllTrials initiative.”
Tracey Brown, Managing Director of Sense about Science said, “We are also delighted to have The Cochrane Collaboration helping to steer the AllTrials campaign. They know very well the struggles that researchers go through to get the clinical trial results they need to produce reliable high-quality reviews. Cochrane has networks of researchers and policy-makers in 120 countries. Their influence and experience is particularly important now that the AllTrials campaign has started to take off internationally.”
Dr Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Pharma said, “It’s great that The Cochrane Collaboration has become one of the principal supporters of the AllTrials campaign. We need all the information about the effects of medicines, to make informed decisions about which is best. We’ve known about the problem of publication bias for three decades, and failed to fix it. We are working with Cochrane to act globally, to protect patients’ best interests and to make medicine genuinely evidence-based.”
Dr Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine said, “The news that Cochrane is supporting the AllTrials campaign, with its international reputation for the delivery of high quality evidence, is an important step to ensuring all trials are published and reported. Cochrane reviews are one of the highest levels of evidence to inform decision making and their findings rely heavily on the publication of trials in full. I would hope their vast array of international authors and collaborators involved in the production of reviews will also sign up to the AllTrials campaign.”