The Food and Drug Administration Act of 2007 established requirements for the preregistration of clinical trials and also set penalties for non-compliance. These measures are meant to decrease publication bias which is, however, also a major issue in preclinical studies. The idea to expand this concept also for preclinical studies was indeed published in 2014 by scientists from the University Medical Center Utrecht: In this article, Jansen of Lorkeers and colleagues not only argue for the pre-registration of preclinical experiments but also put a website for registration in place. After registration by the researcher and logging into the system, the preregistration of studies is possible by providing information to 32 questions in a pleasantly designed form.
Preregistration of preclinical studies seems like a logical step, especially since other quality control measures from clinical studies found their ways into preclinical research as well, e.g. randomization and blinding. Further activities could also include multi-center experiments and a systematic approach to reproduce cutting edge research.