Abstract
The Pharma Documentation Ring (P-D-R) has gone from strength to strength in the 55 years that it has existed. A leading think tank of industry professionals representing some top 20 pharmaceutical companies, the P-D-R has adapted to the challenging and changing environments in which information professionals in today’s environment have to work and has been influential in educating information providers as the sector has evolved. Knowledge, insight, collaboration, innovative technologies, new and emerging trends are key strengths of the P-D-R and this article takes a journey from the very first days when the association was formed to the innovative, influential and growing organization it is today.
Keywords
Introduction
How many professional associations can boast more than 50 years of intense knowledge sharing? How many have been able to sustain support for the aims of their association and successfully assist their member companies in the development of information services – improving coverage, distribution and ensuring optimum use of chemical, biomedical and pharmaceutical information for common benefit? The Pharma Documentation Ring (P-D-R) can do so proudly, and for 55 years the P-D-R has been a leading example of what sector collaboration in the information field can achieve.
This active collaboration continues to be sustained by the vision of the P-D-R which has agreed four common aims that it strives to fulfil (see Figure 1).
Twenty companies, four common aims.
Supported by a unique personal relationship between members and the strong commitment to contributing and joining resources for a common purpose, P-D-R members and their organizations have benefited greatly from exchanging knowledge and working cooperatively over its many years of existence.
The P-D-R’s relationships with stakeholders in the information world have also developed significantly and have been a very strong driver for the association especially over the past few decades. The outcome of these relationships and interaction with stakeholders has been of mutual benefit not only to P-D-R member companies, but also to other information groups within the wider Pharma industry (Figure 2).
What P-D-R means to its members.
Historical overview
Collaboration and networking, a primary focus of P-D-R, is not an invention of Web 2.0. It was in 1958, the same year that Mattel introduced Barbie, NASA was founded and launched the first satellite, and the Atomium was built for the Expo’58 in Brussels, that some information specialists from five German pharmaceutical companies with strong investments in Research and Development (R&D) had the idea to join forces and make important scientific literature retrievable. Before this, each company was reading more or less the same literature and abstracting and indexing selected content to support the work of their R&D staff. Effort required to do this had increased substantially due to the rapid growth in the number of publications and patents during the mid-fifties. The information specialists agreed to work cooperatively to rationalize their activities and efforts (Mullen, 1992). The P-D-R (short for ‘Pharma-Dokumentationsring’) was founded.
The initial aim of the P-D-R was to select and index relevant documents from the scientific literature, to write abstracts and index them based on agreed rules, and to distribute copies of the corresponding punched cards and microfilms to all cooperating members (Specht, 1998). Due to the limited space on a punched card, the P-D-R companies developed fragment codes for chemical structures and biomedical terms allowing them to index all relevant aspects of the publications properly. The Ringcode was born and survived for many decades even when the punched cards were replaced by more sophisticated techniques.
Some years later in 1964, this biomedical literature documentation activity was licensed to the British company Derwent Publications (today’s Thomson Reuters) and the service succeeded as Ringdoc (today’s Derwent Drug File). About ten years later the P-D-R’s chemical reaction coding system was also transferred to Derwent Publications; this evolved as Chemical Reactions Documentation Services. Both services continued to be developed further in cooperation with the originating P-D-R companies and new members of the network. These systems were literature based but managing information on patents in the pharmaceutical area has also been of great interest for P-D-R companies. During the 1970s, the P-D-R saw gradual growth, becoming more international, and it continued to process patents using its Ringcode until 1978.
In the 1980s a new focal point was found for the P-D-R which began to place an emphasis on exchanging experience and intensively testing commercial systems and databases of interest to the R&D-based pharmaceutical industry. As a result its membership grew steadily (Dubosc and Mullen, 1994) with a peak in the late 1990s before the mergers in the pharmaceutical industry started.
Founding member companies
The founder member companies were Bayer, Ciba (now Novartis), Knoll (now Abbvie), Merck, and Thomae (now Boehringer Ingelheim). Today, the P-D-R has 20 member companies from Europe, the US, Japan, and Australia and is still a non-profit organization (see Figure 3). Member companies should be research-based pharmaceutical organizations. There is no membership fee but members must commit to contribute proactively to the work of the P-D-R by active participation in meetings, working groups and task forces, as well as acting as a coordinator of a P-D-R topic, or as host for the P-D-R’s annual general meeting (AGM) or a meeting dealing with a specialist subject of current relevance to members.
2013 Member Companies of the P-D-R.
Whilst the original aims of the P-D-R remain the same, the P-D-R continues to adapt its content focus. This ensures that it remains relevant to the changing business expectations of an information/knowledge management function in today’s global research-based pharmaceutical company operating in a truly dynamic landscape. For information/knowledge management functions in the pharmaceutical industry, it has never been more critical to deliver added value, lead by excellence, and drive innovation. Information both internal and external continues to be the lifeblood of pharma R&D.
How is the P-D-R organized?
The governance of the association is achieved by:
its Annual General Meeting (which is attended by all member companies); the P-D-R Executive Board usually operating with four members and elected by the AGM for two years; and the Topic Group Teams which work continuously on their respective topics of interest.
The AGM is hosted on a rotating basis and is a highlight of the P-D-R calendar. Before the meeting, so-called company reports are distributed via mail. Each member company writes in a common structure about their activities in the information sector during the last 12 months. During the AGM highlights are presented followed by a Q&A session. These reports have a long tradition and are seen as a useful tool that enables some benchmarking and the creation of new ideas for other companies. The agenda also includes reports from the topic teams which meet virtually throughout the year. These topic sessions focus on biomedical information, business information, chemical information and patents, information and knowledge management, library affairs and copyright, innovative technologies and emerging trends, and the P-D-R website. Each year one or two topics are selected as strategic sessions. More agenda time is directed to these sessions which can also be supported by external speakers. Besides some internal P-D-R topics, time is provided for ad hoc discussions about varying hot topics.
The P-D-R Executive Board works all year round. It prepares and runs the AGM together with the host company, selects the strategic topics, allocates members to the topic groups, initiates special meetings, adapts the scope and guidelines to the changing needs, and is the first contact for providers, other information organizations, and potential new members.
The topic teams are coordinated by one P-D-R representative. Each member company has at least one participant in one of the teams. The teams exchange their experiences around the year and have regular virtual meetings with the P-D-R board. They initiate surveys and prepare their session for the AGM.
Current themes amongst the topic groups include:
product literature databases and medical information; competitor information; knowledge management; how users interface with information; return on investment; internal and external data integration; changing methods for accessing information.
New and emerging trends in both the industry and in technologies are a focus for all topic groups as the P-D-R looks to the future.
Annual General Meetings
A successful Annual General Meeting (AGM) is one that is described as ‘topical’, ‘relevant’, and ‘fun’ so when the agenda for an AGM is first discussed by the Board during a planning meeting in February, it aims to bring these components together, building on member feedback from the previous year’s AGM. At a time when for many organizations, travel budgets are tight, a relevant agenda is critical to ensure the meeting is a good investment of time for attendees.
Themes for an agenda are varied and reflect changing trends in the industry, particular challenges that are being faced by information functions, and themes which anticipate where the association believes the information industry will go next.
Sessions are interactive including time for learning, sharing experiences, reflection, and networking. For some participants the AGM is the only time they get away from normal daily routines and the P-D-R Board aims to recognize this by ensuring a focused meeting free from work distractions. Some P-D-R members use the meeting as a time for professional development amongst the many other opportunities that the meeting might present.
As the P-D-R has evolved over the last 55 years, so have the themes for the AGM. The arrival of the digital age, for instance, has presented numerous opportunities to deliver a varied agenda. Big data and the growing adoption of mobile technologies to access information are two examples of topics on which the P-D-R has placed greater emphasis in recent years.
The evolution of topics needing discussion has matched and even led the development of information management, the content industry, and the use of IT for information access. Meetings have always recognized and addressed the pressures and opportunities facing pharma’s R&D information functions. During the P-D-R’s 40th AGM, 14 years ago, the focus was very much on printed materials and intranets (with only around 350 electronic journals available). Today the focus reflects data feeds, electronic content, mobile devices, and the need to define and deliver ‘added value’. However, there are some management related topics that never become outdated, for example knowledge management and the demand for showing return on investment.
The 54th meeting of the PDR was held in Königswinter, Germany, from 18–21 September 2012 and was a typical mixture of fun and topical discussions. Highlights included case studies on successful marketing campaigns - these included interactive video cards advertising core information services, to eye-catching visuals and branded materials. Members could gather new ideas and learn what had worked well and what had not been so successful and why. Case studies formed part of a lengthier strategic session on members’ mobile strategies and achievements.
The Hot Topics session gave the group further opportunities to discuss mobile technologies along with other current issues including the complexities of content access, outsourcing strategies, doing more with less, and changing funding models.
During the three days, each of the P-D-R’s seven topic groups presented on developments made during the year. These presentations included:
a comparison of drug pipeline data sources; a simulated interview that focused on crowd sourced business models; return on investment and how this can be demon-strated; an overview on how clinical trials resources are used and positioned within P-D-R member companies; and interfacing and faceted search portals with organized information that can be structured, searched, and accessed.
Significantly, in the reviews of information developments in each of the P-D-R member companies, the recurring themes continue to be: downsizing; alliances; collaborations and divestitures resulting in changes in staffing models and decreasing or flat budgets. There were also common themes around the migration to SharePoint 2010 for increasing the functionality of library portals and the focus of training for customers to self-serve information services. Who knows what the theme of the AGM will be in another 15 years’ time?
Special meetings and the P-D-R’s success in establishing model licences
Beside these three component activities of the P-D-R, it organizes task forces and special meetings on demand. The Special meetings started in the late 1990s and considered topics such as Intranets, e-journals, the Future Integrated Information World, Linking, Copyright, Taxonomy, and Text Mining. These meetings differed from the AGMs; more people were invited to attend, for example the experts from the member companies and also vendors and suppliers who were active in these fields. These meetings often provide the basis for further work in smaller groups to create a better mutual understanding of a new specialist topic.
After the e-journal special meeting in 1998, a task force was established to work on a set of standard licensing terms for e-journals. During the course of three years and via an intense collaboration between P-D-R, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) the ‘STM/P-D-R sample licence for journals supplied in electronic form’ was launched in 2000. Later revisions followed, and included the ‘Medical Information Clause’. This model licence made e-journal negotiations easier for both the P-D-R companies and the publishers by taking the special needs of research-based pharmaceutical companies into account. Several publications on this successful collaboration can be found on http://www.p-d-r.com/content/publications.
More recent examples were two special meetings around usage rights in the context of text mining in 2009 and 2011. Text mining is of increasing importance in Pharma as companies seek to increase the insight that remains to be discovered across the ever growing content in internal documents and especially in published literature. In the first place, this dialogue created a common understanding of usage and rights among users (here the pharmaceutical companies), the publishers, the intermediaries, and the copyright agencies. Each side had the opportunity to meet their peers face to face and to discuss their open issues, as well as explaining the background to their respective wishes and requirements, on one hand, and for restrictions and limitations on the other hand. As a consequence a task force was established to work on the licensing issues for text mining content. The recent result is the updating of the P-D-R sample licence to grant text and data-mining rights for use with the content to which each of the P-D-R members subscribes. This will enable companies to negotiate rights with publishers to use downloaded data in their internal systems with the confidence that they are seeking rights identical to others in the sector. The agreement was reached between P-D-R, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) on 17 September 2012. A press release can be found at www.p-d-r.com/content/press_releases/archive/listing. This sample licence exemplifies the breakthrough which can be achieved with suppliers when a sector works co-operatively with publishers on an issue of significant concern to both parties. It typifies a key reason why the P-D-R continues to be of value to its members.
P-D-R and the future. . . .
Is there a future for an association like the P-D-R? We strongly believe so. Information and innovation are directly linked, so information management is an indispensable asset for our companies if we are to continue to invent new medicines to improve the lives of patients.
But we live in a challenging world where the overwhelming availability of information carried by a constantly developing information technology scene has transformed the classical library collection management activity into context driven information sourcing, access, and interfacing. ‘Keep me updated in my specific fields of interest’, is the constant demand from users. Likewise the information scientist’s traditional roles in information retrieval and dissemination are now transformed into information discovery, analysis, and consultancy requiring a whole new set of competencies. We are constantly moving in the forefront of information discovery as we try to find new ways and tools to produce answers and insights from the immense pools of information available. So text and data mining, Big-Data, and analytics are the new buzz words in the field. The constant demand for our services is carried by a demand for adding value, with information scientists who are embedded in projects and decision-making processes delivering consolidated and curated input within a highly professional research and intelligence framework.
These challenges and changing roles also present great opportunities, and we have a much better chance to drive this by continued collaboration with one another and in partnership with the information industry and its different stakeholders.
The P-D-R, with its strong history of such collaboration and a unique environment of trust and sharing, has a great future in shaping the non-competitive space, where we can support each other and influence the information environment to understand our needs and challenges.
With initiatives like the ‘The Blueprint of an Ideal Corporate Information Center’ which was published as an article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2012 (1 June), www.p-d-r.com/content/e7/e1419/BlueprintICIC_P-D-RHomepage2.pdf, we try to address the future, examining and defining our roles in information access, information research, information technology and knowledge management. and maintaining the necessary support from our companies. We also strive to continue our collaboration with the information industry stakeholders and live up to our aim of providing a forum for the information industry serving the pharmaceutical sector. 1
We will continue to build on the key factors that have made us so successful:
Membership from the major R&D based pharmaceutical companies. The dynamics of the sector itself which recognizes the importance of its information base and strives for excellence in the elements of information management that stimulate its R&D success; this supports corporate membership. Regular contact between member companies. A long standing governance structure that ensures that the PDR works in areas of mutual importance. Trust between members that has developed over many years and which is inherited by new members enabling discussion of ideas and sharing experience within an environment of complete confidence. Members’ recognition that sharing what they do is the basis of improvement, whilst respecting corporate propriety and intellectual property. Members’ commitment to contributing time and effort to the P-D-R’s work. A history of engagement with suppliers of content and IT that attracts these companies to want to work with the P-D-R.
The 2013 AGM will take place in Chicago, hosted by Abbvie, and in 2014 it will be back in Europe, hosted by Belgium based pharmaceutical company, UCB.