It has been 13 years since the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued a statement requiring the prospective registration of clinical trials (CT) as a condition for publication in a biomedical journal ([@B1]). While CT registries have been in place for at least five decades, no public and comprehensive international registry platform was available before the ICMJE mandate ([@B2] -- [@B4]). In 2004, the Mexico Global Forum and Ministerial Summit on Health Research addressed the vital role of research in the improvement and sustainable development of population health, with a specific emphasis on how to translate knowledge into action to improve health. A global CT registry was deemed as a vital mechanism to enhance the capacity to generate and disseminate knowledge and create "a network ofinternational clinical trials registers to ensure a single point of access and the unambiguous identification of trials" ([@B5]). In May 2006, the WHO International Clinical Trial Registry Platform (ICTRP) was developed following the Summit\'s discussions of clinical trials transparency in health research and narrowing the disparities in health systems performance between developing and developed countries ([@B6]).

At present, the ICTRP forms a network comprising 16 existing Primary Registries and the ClinicalTrials.gov database (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, United States), all of which meet the WHO Registry Criteria or that are working with ICTRP towards becoming a Primary Registry. The ICTRP also provides a unique Universal Trial Number (UTN) to facilitate the explicit identification of CT.

In the last 10 years, the number of registered clinical trials has been increasing