The European Medicines Agency opened up its clinical trials database to the public today.

Information on interventional trials run in all 27 EU member states, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, will now be searchable via the EU Clinical Trials Register website. The register effectively opens up the agency’s previously closed EudraCT database and brings Europe into line with the United States, which has long publicly listed all clinical trials online.

The old system attracted criticism from researchers concerned it would make it easier to bury bad results and hinder proper evidence-based medicine. (See, for example Europe’s clinical trial database criticized in Nature Medicine or New EU trials database is criticised for lack of openness from the BMJ, both 2004.)

Lise Murphy, co-chairwoman of the agency’s Working Party with Patients’ and Consumers’ Organisations, said in a statement that today’s move “increases transparency of medical research and will make it much easier for patients to find information about clinical trials taking place in Europe”.

In future the EMA hopes it can also publish summaries of the results of trials, although this will require a “major upgrade” of the current system.