In an article appearing in the Oct. 12 issue of Science, Consortium Chair Susan M. Wolf and Barbara J. Evans of the University of Houston Law Center sound the alarm about a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Academies' report on "Returning Individual Research Results to Participants" makes recommendations on how to share research results and data with people who agree to participate in research studies and calls for problematic changes to federal law. In Science, Wolf and Evans argue that the Academies' recommendations are "rooted in confusion about the law." They maintain that "The Academies' report endorses the idea of participant access to results and data, but then builds daunting barriers. The report rejects established legal rights of access, two decades of consensus guidelines, and abundant data showing that participants benefit from access while incurring little risk. The report too often prefers paternalistic silence over partnership. . . . True progress on return of results requires accepting participants' established rights of access and respecting the value that participants place on broad access to their data and results. The next step is not to build barriers but to promote transparency." Read the entire Science article here.