STM publisher Elsevier has announced that it will participate in a multi-publisher pilot project led by Crossref. As part of the project, several of Elsevier's leading journals will share details of registered clinical trials with Crossref so that they can be linked to studies that were published as a result of the trial.
For papers that report on clinical trials, Elsevier and other participating publishers will provide Crossref with the DOI and clinical trial number (CTN) of the article. This will create a linked network of papers relevant to individual clinical trials. As a result, studies that were derived from one trial, but that were published by different publishers years apart can now be linked. Researchers can find studies linked to clinical trials by clicking the CrossMark logo on a particular trial report or by using Crossref open APIs.
Initially, 20 leading health and medical science journals will participate in the pilot, including The Lancet, the European Journal of Cancer and the American Journal of Cardiology. Other health and medical science journals will be added after the initial test phase.
Linking studies to the clinical trial registration will enhance readers' understanding of the full results that came out of a trial, making scientific reporting more transparent. It will also enable readers to more easily measure the results of trials against their original aims.
The clinical trial registries involved in the pilot are endorsed by the World Health Organization and include ClinicalTrials.gov, the UTN and ISRCTN registries, along with several leading national registries, such as the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry.
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