Timely publication and sharing of trial data: opportunities and challenges for comparative effectiveness research in cardiovascular disease

There is growing enthusiasm for the timely publication and sharing of clinical trial data. The rationale for open access includes greater transparency, reproducibility, and efficiency of the research enterprise. In cardiovascular diseases, routinely sharing clinical trial data would create opportunities for undertaking comparative effectiveness research, providing much needed evidence on how different interventions compare to each other on key outcomes. Access to individual patient-level data would strengthen the validity of such research. Novel methodological approaches like network meta-analyses using individual patient-level data could reliably compare interventions that have not been compared to each other in head-to-head trials. However, there are significant practical, methodological, financial, and legal challenges to this utopian open access that need to be continually addressed. Sharing clinical trial data openly will only occur when the previously tolerated process of clinical research involving direct ownership and secrecy is abandoned for a new culture in which medical science is open to all of its stakeholders. With this new culture, data will be accessible, reanalysis and further analysis will be considered commonplace, and comparative effectiveness research through novel synthesis approaches such as network meta-analysis can thrive—as long as measures are taken to adequately ensure the goal remains to promote public health.