French ministry cuts funding to researchers who fail to register and report clinical trials

A funding circular published by the French Ministry of Health establishes several transparency rules for clinical trials, backed up by credible monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.

Researchers who fail to register or report their trials will have some of their grant money withheld.

The rules apply to all research conducted under several funding programmes run by the ministry, and thus cover all clinical trials financed through these programmes.

French clinical trials run by industry or funded by other grants programmes are not covered, so these are rules set out by a single funder, not national rules.

How does the system work?

The ministry provides its funding in several tranches. Researchers have to hit specific milestones before they are eligible to receive the next tranche of a grant.  

Specifically:

• A grantee initially receives between 15-25% of the total grant amount to start up the trial.

• The next 25% are only released once the trial has been registered on a public trial registry (and has received regulatory and ethics approval).

• The final 10% are only disbursed once the results of the trial have been made public on a registry.

The rules also require publication of results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Depending on the funding programme, this is verified in two different ways:

• A receipt from a journal confirming that a manuscript has been received for review, or

• Submission of a final project report to the ministry that includes a mandatory section on submitted and published scientific papers

How will compliance be monitored?

The ministry will monitor compliance through routine progress reports that researchers have to provide anyway. This approach hits a sweet spot, enabling comprehensive monitoring without burdening researchers with additional red tape.

Under the rules, grantees are also required to keep registry information up to date throughout the project, but there seems to be no monitoring mechanism to back this up.

The circular does not state whether researchers who fail to publish results will also be barred from submitting new grants to the ministry in future.

 What is the scope of the rules?

While the rules seem geared towards clinical trials, all other types of research supported by the programmes are subject to the same rules.

The ministry recommends that researchers use either ClinicalTrials.gov or the European CTIS drug trial registry, but does not mandate choice of any specific registry. In contrast to Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, France does not have a national trial registry.

Trial transparency in France

The groundwork for these rules appears to have been laid in a 2024 official bulletin.

In 2025, a national report co-sponsored by the ministry called for a wide range of clinical trial transparency measures to be adopted nationwide.

Among other things, the report recommended that funders make payment of the final funding instalment conditional on the publication of trial results, and that funders should publish indicators on the results posting (on registries) and scientific publication of results (in journals) for the trials they fund. 

Not all recommendations of the national report have been implemented yet.

France has not yet adopted a regulation requiring all clinical trials run in the country to post their results on a registry within one year of trial end - a key recommendation of the report.

However, as elsewhere in the European Union, there is already a law in France mandating registry reporting for drug trials.

Information provided to TranspariMED by France’s medicines regulator ANSM suggests that significant efforts are underway to monitor and support compliance with this law.