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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