Despite recent moves by the industry to provide access to clinical trial results, transparency rates vary widely between companies, found a recent study of clinical trial registration and reporting rates.

For a first attempt at setting up a transparency scorecard, Joseph Ross, of Yale School of Medicine, in Connecticut, and colleagues looked at trial registration and reporting rates for 15 drugs, sponsored by 10 large pharmaceutical companies and approved in 2012. On average, companies had only registered 57% of a drug's trials on ClinicalTrials.gov and had published or reported results of 65% of the trials (BMJ Open 5, e009758; 2015). Two companies, GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson, disclosed all the clinical trial results for all their approved drugs. Gilead, the lowest-scoring company, disclosed only 21% of the trial results for its anti-HIV combination of cobicistat, elvitegravir, emtricitabine and tenofovir.

The authors point to three reasons why legal disclosure requirements are not being met: stakeholders perceive the rules to be unclear and ambiguous; mergers and acquisitions, as well as collaborations and licensing agreements, can complicate responsibility for compliance; and a perceived lack of enforcement of the rules (the FDA can impose a penalty of $10,000 per day for lack of compliance, but never has).

The researchers now plan to generate a transparency scorecard and ranking system for all newly approved drugs to “motivate and increase transparency, thereby supporting existing transparency initiatives, advancing clinical innovation, promoting a trustworthy innovation sector and strengthening protection of human research subjects globally”.

A separate analysis by the health publication STAT found that many academic research institutes are also failing to meet reporting requirements, violating federal reporting rules. Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, San Diego — four of the top 10 recipients of federal medical research funding — disclosed research results late or didn't disclose them at all at least 95% of the time since reporting became mandatory in 2008.