One obstacle thwarting investigative reporters who want to use a government database on clinical trials is that researchers aren't turning in the required data.

A story by Nancy Watzman [2] in the Sunlight Foundation's Real Time Investigations blog explains the problems with ClinicalTrials.gov, a registry containing info on more than 78,000 clinical trials.

"This is the perfect case of 'secret' data — data that technically the government is supposed to have, but is being kept from the public," Watzman writes.