The European Medicines Agency is changing its data sharing policy in response to pressure from all of us. At its board meeting yesterday Executive Director Professor Guido Rasi tabled amendments to remove the on-screen-only access clause and to allow researchers to download, save and print clinical study reports. This is great. The policy will now be closer to the original draft the EMA published in June and that hundreds of us supported.
Yesterday’s improvement to the policy only happened because hundreds of researchers, patients and citizens called for it. We’ve heard that a number of the attendees at the meeting didn’t know there had been any criticisms of the policy. If our correspondence hadn’t been tabled the changes probably wouldn’t have been voted through. Huge well done to everyone who wrote, this is down to you.
Of course allowing downloading of the data isn’t everything we called for. We don’t know if there are going to be changes to the redaction policy or to the terms of use that would allow third parties to sue researchers but we don’t think there will be. The EMA is finalising the text of the policy over the next few weeks and we understand it will be published in September.
Read our comments about it here and share this news. Please, get more people to sign the petition. Share the campaign video with as many people as you can and ask them to share it too.
Best wishes
Ian Bushfield
Campaigns Support Officer
Sense About Science
www.AllTrials.net
www.SenseAboutScience.org
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