Cheryll Barron, Big Pharma snared by net, The Guardian, September 26, 2004. The story of how injured families used open access listservs, blogs, and other web tools to collect evidence and build a movement to prove that GlaxoSmithKline was marketing a harmful drug for adolescent depression. Excerpt: "These activists had toiled in deepest obscurity - some of them, for a decade - until their discoveries were featured on a Panorama programme, 'Secrets of Seroxat', in autumn 2002....The outcry that followed forced GSK to make a stunning admission. In June 2003, it corrected its prescribing instructions for Seroxat, revising its estimate of the risk of withdrawal symptoms from one in 500 to one in four....Infinitely more frightening than that reluctant confirmation of a drug's potential for harm was that in the years GSK spent denying it, this pharma had the backing of institutions that we, the public, rely on to protect us from poisoning by prescription....The internet was 'groaning with evidence'; over time, the 'cover-up became more obvious as the weight of scientific evidence got stronger and public protest grew'. Those are quotations from a magisterial history and analysis of the antidepressant crisis by two leading campaigners, Charles Medawar and Anita Hardon, in Medicines Out of Control?, a new book recommended by the Lancet as essential reading for members of the parliamentary committee examining pharma influence on health policy, whose hearings began last week. As critical to the pharmas' outing as the raw data on the internet was this medium's capacity for handling complexity - at the speed of firing neurons....Some of these sites also feature open access to years of correspondence between the activists and regulatory officials and pharma executives. Postings like these have allowed rapid international co-ordination between the campaigners."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/28/2004 07:40:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
