Publishing study protocols: making them visible will improve registration, reporting and recruitment

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

In 1999, Iain Chalmers, director of the UK Cochrane Centre, and Doug Altman, of the ICRF Statistics Group in Oxford, called for journals to play a more radical role in the prevention of poor medical research [1]. Most useful, they suggested, might be the publication of protocols for proposed or ongoing research, and in particular, protocols of randomised controlled trials. Taking up this challenge, BioMed Central now invites trialists and other researchers, including systematic reviewers, to publish their full protocols on line (see table). Two have already been published: a case control study of autism and MMR vaccination (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/1/2 webcite) [2], and the CRASH trial, a multicentre randomised controlled trial of steroids in head injury (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-227X/1/1 webcite) [3].