Full assessment of psychiatric drug development methods and practices is prevented by selective publication of data and the failure to publish negative CTs (7, 8, 23, 24). When information from drug developments and CTs go unreported, the predictive ability of preclinical models cannot be judged, and investigators do not learn from earlier failures how to improve methods and practices (2). Progress in science and its methods follows from overcoming errors through trial-and-error learning. Lack of access to apparently failed efforts ensures that others will repeat these mistakes and, in turn, not publish the results. In addition, the causes of drug failures are usually not obvious and often remain uncertain even after careful review and further investigation (10, 25). Companies tend to abandon studies of drugs considered to be without commercial benefits, leaving academia without access to the data needed to examine whether trials showing that a drug is ineffective may have resulted from flaws in development and design, not from lack of efficacy. This analysis cannot occur in academia without full access to information. To the discredit of medicine, incomplete publication of human research persists (8) even though Chalmers (23) identified underreporting as scientific misconduct in 1990 (10).
