Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that the journal Trials has introduced a new way for investigators to ensure that their clinical trials can be updated with important amendments to study protocols or new research findings. 'Update' articles will give researchers the ability to rapidly publish revisions, and further findings to their original papers, thus ensuring a complete and ongoing scientific record.
The first of these new Update articles has been published in Trials for IST3 (3rd International Stoke Trial), which includes more than 3,000 patients with acute stroke. Outlining baseline characteristics of patients recruited to the trial and detailing changes to the study protocol, the Update provides readers with the latest information on this 12-year large scale clinical trial, which previously had no appropriate publication format in the peer-reviewed literature. Rather than being published as an entirely new body of research or protocol, the IST3 update is directly linked to the original study and protocol, published in 2008, and is a prelude to the availability of the final results in 2012.
This 'threaded' approach to publication is seen to represent an evolution in the way scholarly output and particularly clinical trials can be reported. It is also said to represent a fundamental shift towards researchers and clinicians being able to quickly and easily find and access all articles and data related to a particular treatment.
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