Yesterday I found in my Feedly a post in the Open Access Tracking Project feed about another tracker, the EU Trials Tracker. Reminders help us improve things. Maturity indicators help us point how we can improve things (not should). It's called formative assessment. Ranking, on the other hand, tend to be quite judgmental, which I find not so useful. When the ranking is used to make, for example, tenure or funding decisions, that's where wrong things happen. Some would argue (yes, they do), that ranks scare people and that people need some fear to get the best out of them. Sounds a tid bit too negative and depressing to me, to be honest.
Anyway, the EU Trials Tracker makes an overview institutes and their, well, track record. The post in the feed happened to post results for Maastricht University:
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| Screenshot of the website. |
This is not new and the real challenge is to figure out how we can make the reporting easier to complete. What are the bottlenecks? What is preventing people to complete it? Are those technical? Social? Because of patient privacy? A mere ranking will not tell you that.
So, the EU Trials Tracker is a nice visual reporting tool. Let's make it support doing better science. Or, if that is too tricky, let's make it more educational and have entries explain more about the science behind the trial and why it was thought to be a good idea.
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