Emma Veitch's blog

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which PLoS Medicine, and other PLoS journals, are members, has recently released guidance for editors on the thorny topic of "research, audit and service evaluations". This guidance aims to help editors decide how to handle their journal's requirement for ethical review in relation to these types of studies. As outlined by COPE, most journals require that for any research involving human subjects, the study has been approved by a properly constituted ethics committee.

Just spotted an interesting letter in last week's Lancet discussing selective reporting of clinical trials. This may sound like something you've heard many times before (eg here) but in the Lancet letter the authors describe what happenned to trials for which the original protocols were posted on Lancet's own website.

In the US, a new law will very soon require sponsors of clinical trials to start submitting data on the results of completed trials into an expanded version of the registry website clinicaltrials.gov.

Editors spend so much of every day with their heads thoroughly immersed, indeed swimming, in research papers, that it can be heartening to hear about initiatives that aim to prioritise the studies that really will make a difference. Yesterday I happenned to drop in to a press conference that was being held to launch the World Health Organization's new initiative, "Make Medicines Child Size".

Editors rarely have much to delight them on cold Friday mornings in Cambridgeshire so here at PLoS-UK HQ there was a frisson of excitement over Ben Goldacre's latest blog. It seems faintly ridiculous that around 50 years after the first properly randomized trials were done (and please don't quote me on specifics here, because I'm not a trials historian - check out the James Lind Library if you want more precision), anyone has to defend the importance of scientific rigour, appropriate controls, and dispassionate appraisal of all the available evidence. And yet with respect to the practice of homeopathy, someone has to go to the trouble of laying out the basic principles of evidence-based medicine: just read the blog to find out why.