Two weeks ago we were advised that Thomson Reuters Scientific has decided to discontinue four of its peer review journals, effective with year’s end: Current Opinion in Investigational Drugs, Current Opinion in Drug Discovery; Development, Current Opinion in Molecular Therapeutics and IDrugs. Sad news, especially with respect to IDrugs where H.M. Pharma Consultancy had published on a regular basis during the past decade — but even more so with respect to COID where I had been patent editor, also for about since the millennium. From what I learned from TRS they are discontinuing other patent-related products too.
Well, I had expected something like this from the moment I heard about the Thomson takeover by Reuters, which is ultimately a digital news and business service company while Thomson Scientific was a mixed digital-and-print scientific service division of Thomson. Moving from print to digital is a secular trend and I expect that the huge and diverse Thomson Reuters patent database business will not suffer — even though it could profit from intelligent consolidation.
But I think its still a pity because these discontinued print products were among the very few life science journals that routinely accepted and used patents as a technical and scientific information source alongside with peer reviewed contributions. True, there is a broad choice of dedicated life science patent review journals such as Informa Healthcare’s Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents, and even more specialized ones, e.g., Bentham Science’s pharma-related titles from the “Recent Patents on…” series. But these tend to reinforce the still-prevalent biased opinion that patents are something that is set apart from the peer review realm “where the real scientific information can be found.” Instead of taking an inclusive approach towards intellectual property documents as an information source, these journals shunt them into a siding… almost a well-maintained ghetto.
We have been thinking about establishing a special section on this blog (or on our website, www.hmpharmacon.com – or perhaps even on an entirely new site) that will highlight and briefly comment on some particularly interesting new life science patents, and relate them to the PubMed-cited literature. Stay tuned!