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49th Annual General Meeting of the P-D-R 2007

The Pharma Documentation Ring (P-D-R) held its 49th Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Philadelphia, USA from the 25th – 28th September 2007. The P-D-R is an association whose members represent the scientific information departments of the leading international R&D-based pharmaceutical corporations. This was the first occasion that the association has held a meeting outside of Europe and is in recognition of an increasing involvement from US headquartered companies and delegates. There was no change to the total number of corporate members during the previous 12 months. The 21 member companies continue to account for approximately 60% of the total global turnover of ethical drugs (approximately $500 billion); by far the majority of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are P-D-R members.

Thirty nine delegates, including at least one representative from each of the 21 member companies, attended this year’s meeting, which was expertly hosted jointly by Merck & Co. and Bristol Myers Squibb. In addition, there were guest speakers from Bristol-Myers-Squibb, CAS, Elsevier, Minesoft, and Thomson Scientific. Future Science hosted an enjoyable informal reception for delegates, prior to the official opening of the meeting.

Henning P. Nielsen (Novo Nordisk), President of the P-D-R, in his opening address highlighted the changes that are taking place in technology, in the information industry we rely on, and in our own pharmaceutical industry. He stated that in the last few years, we have seen the emergence of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and social computing, and he advised that we can anticipate a whole new generation of recruits accustomed to working in virtual worlds and to interacting with friends and colleagues via tools like Facebook. We have also seen continuing consolidation within the information industry, and a pharmaceutical industry coming to terms with fewer new chemical entities being approved each year by the regulatory authorities, expiry of patents on blockbusters and major products, and increased generic competition. To maintain shareholder value, pharmaceutical companies have continued to engage in merger/acquisition activity, together with major re-organisations and streamlining of their operations, coupled to cost cutting and staff reductions.

Henning reported that a major achievement during the year was the P-D-R reaching agreement with a group of publisher representatives on a new version of the STM/P-D-R model licence. This forms a useful starting point for electronic journal negotiations. The new model licence clarifies and extends some of the usage rights for electronic publications.

As in previous years, two of the principal highlights of the meeting were the discussions on two strategic topics that had been identified prior to this meeting. The two selected topics for 2007 were

· Intellectual Property Solutions
· Library 2.0 – The Library of the Future

During the ‘Intellectual Property Solutions’ strategic topic session, representatives of three major IP information providers were asked to set out their Company’s vision for IP Solutions. Tina Tomeo (CAS) advised that CAS’ content strategy was becoming increasingly global, but continued to be focused on maintaining currency and adding value through integration and indexing. She highlighted the improved coverage and timeliness of Chinese, Indian, Korean and Mexican patents within CAPlus despite an exponential growth in new substances entered into the Registry and a similar growth in patent applications filed at international patent offices. Rahman Hyatt (Minesoft) advised that his company’s strategy was to work closely with customers on delivering both general and customised solutions that were designed to integrate closely with the existing workflows and systems used within their customer’s companies. He added that Minesoft had a strong track record of turning ideas into successful products. Bob Stembridge (Thomson Scientific) also highlighted the growth in patent volumes and particularly the growth in patent applications in China, India and Korea. Thomson Scientific’s response had been to move some of their editorial operations to their offices in India to control costs. Bob Stembridge also reported that Thomson Scientific were working to improve the content and coverage of their strategic patent offering Derwent World Patent Index, whilst continuing to work on the development of an integrated next generation IP workflow solution. These three presentations were then followed by a round table discussion in which all three speakers responded to questions from the audience.

In the second strategic topic on Library 2.0, a speaker from Bristol Myers Squibb introduced delegates to the social networking, social collaboration and social publishing tools that form part of Web 2.0, and discussed via case studies how these could be usefully employed within a large company. Tools that were discussed included Wikis e.g. Wikipedia and WikiHow, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Teamspace, Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn. This excellent overview was then followed by two presentations from representatives of Abbott and Novo Nordisk illustrating the use of social networking and collaboration tools within their companies.

Common themes to emerge from the reviews of information related developments within P-D-R companies over the previous twelve months were continuing structural re-organisations of Information Departments, downsizing of the physical library space, with library closures and the outsourcing of physical library collections to 3rd parties to manage, largely steady state e-journal collections, but continuing growth in e-book collections. Several companies reported that they were making more extensive use of pay per view.

Information products acquired by more than one company during the previous twelve months included Pharmapendium for drug safety data, TrialTrove for clinical trial data, Pharmacircle for drug delivery information, SFX for linking to e-journal articles, and Rightsphere for copyrights management.

In addition to those company reports and the two strategic topics, P-D-R members work together in Topic Groups and each Group presented their highlights during the AGM.

The ‘Business Intelligence Resources’ team invited representatives from Elsevier to present their new pipeline information product Inteleos including the Universal Integrator, which enables a user to formulate a single search query, and submit it to several different pipeline databases. The Integrator uses a proprietary ontology to generate the correct search query for each pipeline database, then submits the searches to the databases, and finally combines all the search results into a convenient table. Roche presented the outcome of a comparison of search results obtained (for 28 out of 160 drugs) from 5 major pipeline databases. As in previous years no database presented all the information correctly; sometimes the information was within the text but not in the appropriate searchable field; and even more surprising was that information freely available from the Roche company web site was sometimes missing. Merck KGaA summarized the results of a quick poll that demonstrated that Factiva, NewsEdge and Reuters Health were the news providers preferred by P-D-R member companies.

The ‘Technology – Intranet/Internet’ group had previously asked members which new technologies had recently been introduced or tested. Fields mentioned were library/linking tools, search engines, content management systems, and most often data and text mining solutions. Organon presented their search engine project showing that Vivisimo fit to most of their requirements including retrieval across multiple information containers and systems, multi-lingual capacities, deduplication, security, and intuitive navigation. Novo Nordisk discussed the ScioSphere KnowledgeViewer, which was originally developed to enable their users to browse through large quantities of text faster, including literature databases, patent search results, and e-journal articles. They advised that other organisations are now able to license the product.

During the ‘Chemical and Patent Information’ session the results of the P-D-R electronic laboratory notebook survey were presented showing a considerable growth in use in recent years. An overview of annotated databases, which involve the incorporation of literature-based pharmacological information into traditional chemical repositories, was presented, followed by a discussion on whether there is a need to try to standardize on how chemical structure information is held in internal and external sources. The USPTO peer-to-patent pilot, which opens the patent examination process to the public for some types of patents was discussed critically.

The ‘Information and Knowledge Management’ group focussed on techniques for process improvement in information management. They found that although many companies had used Lean Sigma to drive out waste from their processes, very few had employed Six Sigma techniques to remove variations. GSK delivered a presentation on how they had used Lean Sigma to deliver significant improvements to their document delivery process and Novo Nordisk presented the company’s climate surevy tool, which enables a constant focus on improving working climate in all units.

The ‘Biomedical Information’ team, which had been combined with the former ‘Medical Information’ topic, conducted a survey on outsourcing, which revealed that P-D-R companies now outsource 25% of their information related activities. User training and the administration of journal subscriptions were the most commonly outsourced activities, with information retrieval & analysis outsourced relatively infrequently. A further presentation presented the results of a survey into how companies were responding to the new EU rules (March 2007) on pharmacovigilance and drug safety data, and on the occasion of the P-D-R Meeting being held in Philadelphia, there was a short review of the pioneering work of Eugene Garfield and ISI.

Presentations during the ‘Library Affairs and Copyright’ session dealt with the future of the physical library in terms of a teaching library, the marketing of services, the integration of e-sources e.g. e-books into the daily work of a scientist, communication strategies for libraries/information departments focussing on competencies instead of products, and an update on Copyright issues including rights managements and the implementation of Rightsphere.

It was agreed that the P-D-R would hold a Special Meeting in the Spring, to be organised by the Library Affairs and Copyright Topic Group, which would deal with the complex issues involved in accessing 3rd party full text materials within a global company, including difficulties that can arise from different local copyright situations.

At the end of the meeting, a new P-D-R Board was elected for a period of two years starting in January 2008: Henning Nielsen (Novo Nordisk) will continue as president, and Lou Ann Di Nallo (BMS), Claudia Körner (Bayer HealthCare), Matthias Staab (Sanofi-Aventis) will also serve on the Board.

The 50th P-D-R AGM will be held in Montreux, Switzerland from the 23rd - 26th September 2008 and will be hosted by Novartis. The 50th Anniversary of the P-D-R will have a special significance and a committee has been established to oversee the development of a suitable programme of activities and celebrations.

The P-D-R web site can be found at http://www.p-d-r.com

 

 

 



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