A group of publishers have announced a development to uniquely identify each clinical trial and easily link to related publications for the first time. This will make it easier for health professionals to obtain all the necessary information relating to a clinical trial for their patients, and to ensure transparency for researchers.
The resulting initiative is the culmination of three years' collaboration between publishers, led by the open access publisher BioMed Central and Crossref, the not-for-profit membership organisation who runs a shared scholarly infrastructure.
This development means that clinical trial numbers (CTNs) can now be linked up with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The information is available through Crossref's open API and delivered through their CrossMark service, which also allows publishers to highlight key information, such as funding sources and retractions. Publisher members deposit metadata with Crossref, who accepts CTNTRNs from the sixteen trial registries endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
This three-year effort led by BioMedCentral and Crossref bridges the gap between the initial publication of clinical trial registration to the later publications and secondary analyses. Health professionals and researchers will now have easy, open access to all the published content related to a clinical trial via the Crossref CrossMark dialogue box.
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