Science literature access and its impact on R&D for Pharma
An excellent editorial on the latest Nature Biotechnology…
In a few words, the situation is:
- Majority of small-to-mid-sized biotech companies have no libraries to speak of and no librarians to help with literature searches
- Majority of small-to-mid-sized biotech companies cannot afford expensive subscriptions of STM big packages
- Open Access is not yet enough significant in medicine fields
- Many scientists “violate” licensing agreements by borrowing access codes from universities
- Information underload is a daily issue for biotech companies
- Big pharmas have eliminated their internal libraries
- Big Pharmas rely on biotech for their future pipelines
As a result, “One cannot expect high productivity from the smaller emerging companies that collectively suffer from an inability to afford access to reports describing new discoveries in the biomedical sciences“…
Lyman, Stewart. Industry access to the literature. Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 29, N°7, July 2011. p. 571-572
Free access at:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v29/n7/full/nbt.1909.html
[...] This initiative is developped by Stewart Lyman, a science-for-free activist, that I have already mentioned when he wrote in Nature Biotechnology. [...]
iPubSci: an alternative to expensive science journals? « Science Intelligence and InfoPros
December 5, 2011 at 9:23 pm