Peter Doshi, senior editor, Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief

Author affiliations

Correspondence to: P DoshiPdoshi@bmj.com

Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny

In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234

The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance…