How an international research funder's forum developed guiding principles to ensure value and reduce waste in research.

When health-related research funding agencies choose to fund research, they balance a number of competing issues: costs, stakeholder views and potential benefits. The REWARD Alliance, and the related Lancet-REWARD Campaign, question whether those decisions are yielding all the value they could. A group of health-related research funding agencies, organisations that represent health-related research funding agencies and those that inform and set health-related-research funding policy from around the world have come together since 2016 to share, learn, collaborate and influence emerging practice.

Designing clinical trials for future space missions as a pathway to changing how clinical trials are conducted on Earth.

Objective: The project aims to build a framework for conducting clinical trials for long-term interplanetary missions to contribute to innovation in clinical trials on Earth, especially around patient involvement and ownership.

Methods: We conducted two workshops in which participants were immersed in the speculative scenario of an interplanetary mission in which health problems emerged that required medical trials to resolve. The workshops used virtual reality and live simulation to mimic a zero-gravity environment and visual perception shifts and were followed by group discussion.

Trial Forge Guidance 2: how to decide if a further Study Within A Trial (SWAT) is needed.

The evidence base available to trialists to support trial process decisions-e.g. how best to recruit and retain participants, how to collect data or how to share the results with participants-is thin.

Trial Forge Guidance 1: what is a Study Within A Trial (SWAT)?

Randomised trials are a central component of all evidence-informed health care systems and the evidence coming from them helps to support health care users, health professionals and others to make more informed decisions about treatment. The evidence available to trialists to support decisions on design, conduct and reporting of randomised trials is, however, sparse. Trial Forge is an initiative that aims to increase the evidence base for trial decision-making and in doing so, to improve trial efficiency.

Letter to the editor - round table unites to tackle culture change in an effort to improve animal research reporting.

A round table discussion was held during the LAVA-ESLAV-ECLAM conference on Reproducibility of Animal Studies on the 25th of September 2017 in Edinburgh. The aim of the round table was to discuss how to enhance the rate at which the quality of reporting animal research can be improved. This signed statement acknowledges the efforts that participant organizations have made towards improving the reporting of animal studies and confirms an ongoing commitment to drive further improvements, calling upon both academics and laboratory animal veterinarians to help make this cultural change.