From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0: Semantic Search and Social Media in the Pharmaceutical industry and STM Publishing

By Hervé Basset, Stuart David and Denise Silber

Science 2.0 uses the resources of Web 2.0 to communicate between scientists, and with the general public. Web 3.0, in turn, has brought disruptive technologies such as semantic search, cloud computing and mobile applications into play. The term Pharma 3.0 anticipates the future relationship between drug makers and doctors with their patients in light of such technology. From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0 examines these developments, discussing the best and worst of Web 2.0 in science communication and health. Successes such as the Open Access phenomena and also less successful networks are covered. This title is divided into three parts. The first part considers the Web 2.0 revolution, and the promise of its impact on science communication and the state of Science 2.0. The second part looks at impact on Pharma and Health, including attempts to utilise digital in Pharma. The last part looks at the promising disruptive technologies of Web 3.0, including semantic search in biomedicine and enterprise platforms. The book concludes by looking forward to developments of ‘3.0’ in Pharma and STM publishing.

• Gives a global overview of success and failure in Science 2.0
• Presents useful stories and lessons learned
• Gives a clear view of how semantic search is present in science platforms and its potential in STM publishing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781780633756

Hervé Basset

Hervé Basset is Librarian at a large pharmaceutical company. In parallel, he is an independent consultant and the owner of scienceintelligence.wordpress.com and regularly gives courses to information professionals and conferences. Hervé's current interest focuses on monitoring technologies and the application of Web 2.0 and Social Media to Science business. Hervé has a Masters degree in Library and Information Science.

Book preview

From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0

Semantic search and social media in the pharmaceutical industry and STM publishing

Hervé Basset

David Stuart

Denise Silber

François Boutin

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

List of figures

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Introduction

Part 1: From Science 2.0 (2000–2010) …

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Web 2.0 revolution and the promise of Science 2.0

Abstract:

The web as a platform: web services, the cloud and the app

Harnessing collective intelligence

Data as the ‘next Intel Inside’

Chapter 2: The state of Science 2.0

Abstract:

A reluctance to change

Scepticism about the promise of Science 2.0

The lack of a supportive environment

Conclusion

Part 2: … and Pharma 2.0 …

Introduction

Chapter 3: Health 2.0 and beyond

Abstract:

2.0 becomes social media

Big promises: is there a pot of gold?

Leading Health 2.0 and social media sites and applications

Chapter 4: The digital pharma industry

Abstract:

The pharma industry adopts …

The pharma industry watches …

The pharma industry remains cautious: the dark face of SoMe

Part 3: … to Pharma 3.0 (2010–)

Introduction

Chapter 5: The semantic search in life sciences

Abstract:

Semantic? What’s this?

What do researchers expect?

A survey of biomedical semantic interfaces

The future will be semantic

The semantic for pharmas

Chapter 6: Enterprise 2.0 and Web 3.0

Abstract:

Enterprise 2.0

MS SharePoint 2010

And the next revolutions are?

Conclusion

Chapter 7: The next 3.0

Abstract:

Science 3.0

Pharma 3.0

Big STM 3.0

Conclusion

References

Index

Copyright

Chandos Publishing

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Avenue 4

Station Lane

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Oxford OX28 4BN

UK

Tel: + 44(0) 1993 848726

Email: [e-mail]

www.chandospublishing.com

www.chandospublishingonline.com

Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Woodhead Publishing Limited

Woodhead Publishing Limited

80 High Street

Sawston

Cambridge CB22 3HJ

UK

Tel: + 44(0) 1223 499140

Fax: + 44(0) 1223 832819

www.woodheadpublishing.com

First published in 2012

ISBN: 978-1-84334-709-5 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-78063-375-6 (online)

Chandos Social Media Series ISSN: 2050–6813 (print) and ISSN: 2050–6821 (online)

© H. Basset, D. Stuart and D. Silber, 2012

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. This publication may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The publisher makes no representation, express or implies, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions.

The material contained in this publication constitutes general guidelines only and does not represent to be advice on any particular matter. No reader or purchaser should act on the basis of material contained in this publication without first taking professional advice appropriate to their particular circumstances. All screenshots in this publication are the copyright of the website owner(s), unless indicated otherwise.

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Printed in the UK and USA.

List of figures

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Hervé Basset,     France

It has not been an easy writing process. It is often said that there are three rules for writing a book; unfortunately, nobody knows what they are, especially not me!¹ I would like to thank my co-authors, David, Denise and Francois, for their continued efforts over the last few months and their understanding of my exigent requests and deadlines.

Other people have enriched my vision and knowledge, either through their discussion or by answering my questions: I would especially like to thank Paul Tunnah of pharmaphorum, Christophe Asselin of Digimind, Andrew Spong of STweM, Daniel Mayer of TEMIS, Rafael Sidi and Judson Dunham of Elsevier, Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo, Dr Sian Harris of the magazine Research Information, and many others, including the team at Chandos, for their kind patience with me.

December 2011

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¹Adapted from the Somerset Maugham quote, reported by Patrick Forsyth (2010, p. 5).

About the authors

Herve Basset has been working in the pharmaceutical industry as an information manager for more than ten years, so he has a great understanding both of drug manufacturers and consumers of scientific information. Before this, he worked in the education sector in a university science library in France, but he left to join the pharmaceutical industry, where he could gain access to expensive specialist databases. Herve often attends and sometimes speaks at conferences, where he meets publishers and end users, and he works on a daily basis with researchers who are struggling with an overload of scientific information. He is the owner of the blog scienceintelligence.wordpress.com.

David Stuart is a research associate at King's College London, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, where he gained his Ph.D. in webometrics. He regularly writes about social media, open science, and the web of data in both academic and professional journals, and is author of the recent book Facilitating Access to the Web of Data: A Guide for Librarians.¹

Denise Silber is an American living in Europe. She has a deep knowledge of what is happening in the US, where Health 2.0 is experiencing a massive shift, and she is also acutely aware of how this movement is affecting Europe. She is the owner of the Basil Strategies consultancy,² and the organizer of the well-known annual Doctors 2.0™ & You conference in Paris.³

Francois Boutin has a Ph.D. in computer science and is an associate professor at Montpellier University, France. As an expert on information visualization and medical information research, he is especially interested in alternative search interfaces, and has been passionate for many years about semantic interfaces.

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¹For more information on David's work, see http://www. davidstuart.co.uk/.

²See http://en.basilstrategies.com/.

³See http://www.doctors20.com/.

Introduction

On 22 December 2011, a search on Amazon’s website found 1953 books on ‘Web 2.0’ but only 24 for ‘Science 2.0’; a total of 85 books on ‘Web 3.0’ but no results for ‘Pharma 3.0’! Although these catchwords have become overused in magazines and web communication, very few readers are likely to be able to give clear definitions of these concepts in plain English. Many articles have appeared in the media, but nothing really exhaustive and nothing with enough perspective.

The original purpose of this book was to write down for the first time a clear and honest account of the state of Science 2.0.¹ It appeared to me that since 2009, only a few years after ‘Science 2.0’ was coined for the first time, the term ‘social media’ had, slowly but surely, replaced ‘Web 2.0’ in web communication, including that about science; Google Trends shows inverse curves for both of these terms in 2008–9.² Any book now written on the subject has to give a clear analysis of its successes and failures, and this is why I asked David Stuart to write the first two chapters of this book, with the challenge of drawing an honest picture of Science 2.0. I knew that he would be able to speak clearly, forgo guru’s speeches and other expert predictions, and tell the real story with a critical eye.

David provides here a highly original account of the so-called ‘Science 2.0 revolution’, and starts in the first chapter with a refreshing reminder of the early promises of Web 2.0. He takes the time to disambiguate various overused concepts such as social networks, blogs, wikis, online services and cloud applications, before going on to explain how these technologies have impacted scientific communication and journal publishing. David gives an impressive list of must-know services, and then introduces some emerging concepts, including harnessing collective intelligence, open science, semantic search and open data initiatives. He ends in the second chapter with a unique portrayal of Science 2.0, which has so far failed to attract the widespread attention of the scientific community. I have no doubt now that these numerous attempts have deeply influenced the corporate sector and, of course, STM (scientific, technical and medical) publishing; indeed, this fact is demonstrated in this book. David’s important contribution to this book probably constitutes the world’s first historical guide to Science 2.0!

While preparing this book, it occured to me that there was a subtle relationship between the Web 2.0 revolution and the birth of the Health 2.0 movement: both experienced a profound change in the empowerment of their consumers: scientists in the first case, patients in the second. I considered Denise Silber to be the best observer that I could find, and asked her to write the third chapter of this book. Denise starts with clear definitions of concepts such as Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0 and others that are now very common in the media. She demonstrates how patients today are much more proactive with regard to their own medical records, and try to be involved in decisions taken by their physicians either through individual initiatives or patient communities; doctor communities are also vertical extensions of mass social networks. Denise tries to answer two important questions: does social media have a positive outcome on public health, and does it affect the strategy of big pharma?

It is clear to me that the massive Health 2.0 revolution has and will have an increasingly direct impact on marketing communication and the global attitudes of the pharmaceutical industry. As a vigilant observer myself, my own contributions to this book are dedicated to social media success stories and challenges for big pharma. Readers of my blogs will recognize some stories: much has already been said and written about the digital marketing of big pharma.³ I have decided to present here only the most fascinating stories and to consider the impact of social pharma on public health outcomes. I asked two experts, Paul Tunnah and Andrew Spong, to contribute to the fourth chapter and write about the real impact of recent digital marketing campaigns, and they give here a rare analysis of the reality of the industry. Based on this, I have tried to draw a picture of various challenges that the industry has to address in this new era of digital marketing.

Tim Berners-Lee himself said in 2006 that the term ‘Web 2.0’ is ‘a piece of jargon. Nobody even knows what it means’ (Laningham, 2006). But the use (and abuse) of the ‘3.0’ suffix is even worse! ‘Web 3.0’, ‘Pharma 3.0’, ‘Science 3.0’ and other catchwords have flourished in magazines, yet nobody is able to give a clear definition. I asked an information technology (IT) professional, Francois Boutin, to explain in the fifth chapter how semantic interfaces might change search engines, and he decided to use the famous database PubMed to demonstrate what our future search engine experiences might be like.

I myself have tried to figure out in the sixth chapter the nature of the transition between the massive adoption of Web 2.0 services in the private sphere and its integration within companies. This consumerization in the workplace has led naturally to the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, often called Enterprise 2.0, where the market leader is currently Microsoft SharePoint. The question addressed in the seventh chapter is whether Web 3.0 technologies, which remain a little vague for most of us, will modify our future research paradigm. Pharma 3.0 is still a concept, and we will see what this might mean for the future of the industry.

I never realized that the pharmaceutical industry and STM publishing had so many similarities, but this became more and more apparent during the long process of writing this book. Both had, until the 2000s, the same golden business model with similar double-digit margins,⁴ regular growth, and scandalous profits, despite the recent economic crises in 2001 and 2008.⁵ As the consultant Wendy Warr stated: ‘Both sectors have been safe havens for investors such as pension funds’ (Warr, 2008). The year 2010 has again seen a global revenue increase for the publishing industry across all sectors, including professional and scholarly businesses (Tonkery, 2011). The traditional model of scholarly publishing has sometimes been called the ‘pipeline’ model, referring to the golden age of the big pharma giants’ model (Moxley, 2010). Commercial publishers control 64 per cent of the publication of new scientific material (ibid.), a commodity (indeed, non-proprietary academic content) that they obtain free of charge from authors, and which is also qualified by reviewers at no cost to themselves. Big pharma, meanwhile, has been accused of using scientific progress that has been funded three times by public money (for research, peer review and purchase by public libraries), to develop what are essentially commercial products (Right to Research Coalition, 2012a). STM publishing controls various blockbuster publications: rare, very high impact and largely unaffordable journals (Science, Cell and Nature, to name a few) in which researchers ‘have to’ publish. The most reputed science journals now have a subscription rate of around $25 000 a year, which every serious scientific library ‘must’ sign up for (Right to Research Coalition, 2012b). There are also accusations that big pharma delays projects on certain diseases that are not ‘profitable’ enough, and that STM giants slow the pace of scientific advancement by preventing widespread access to the latest articles. The problem of the inaccessibility of expensive journals is a long-standing issue for scientific progress, as the lack of suitable drugs is a matter of daily survival for millions of people in developing countries (Lyman, 2011). Big pharma has orphan diseases, and STM publishers have orphan works!⁶

As the top ten leading pharmaceutical companies are often called big pharma,⁷ we will refer in this book to the leading commercial publishers in scientific, technical and medical fields (Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Wolters Kluwer, Sage, Informa, Nature Publishing Group, etc.) as ‘big STM’.⁸ For big pharma, the golden age is clearly over,⁹ although this is not so certain for big STM.¹⁰ The latest Outsell market forecast predicts that the STM segment will grow 4.3 per cent in 2011 to $26 billion (Ware, 2011). Both sectors are characterized by having the same company interests: ‘Both pharma and STM publishing are cash-rich sectors that have played the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) game’ (Warr, 2008).

Big pharma and big STM demonstrate the same ‘arrogant’ behaviour towards their consumers: both lobby intermediate decision makers (doctors, library associations, universities, etc.) either in their own interests or against those of their competitors, and take action such as leading publicity campaigns against generics and Open Access (OA), for which they use very effective persuasive marketing skills.¹¹ Furthermore, both have had ambiguous relationships with third-party public organizations (public health bodies, universities, etc.) and have caused much controversy in the past due to issues such as non-ethical funding, ghostwriting in science journals, conflicts of interest, fake journals, and so on.¹²

It was said ten years ago that big pharma and big STM would both disappear, the first because of generics and the second because of the Internet revolution. In fact, neither of them has really been affected: ‘The web was meant to disrupt this industry, but the organisations that existed in this space 20 years ago are still by and large there today’ (Harris, 2011). They do, however, have similar threats to the future of their business: patent shifts and a reduction in public health expenses are a cause for concern for big pharma shareholders; while budget cuts for corporate customers, advertisers and libraries, and increasing pressure for OA are the main current challenges for big STM.¹³ Both have tried business and geographical diversification in recent years: big pharma is investing in emerging markets and growing partnerships with biotech companies to accelerate the drug discovery process and to enrich its portfolio; and big STM is also looking towards Asian markets and is exploring online sales, alternatives to OA¹⁴ and new services (Elsevier and Nature, for instance, have made multiple attempts to reinvent their core business using Web 2.0). But most initiatives come from small publishers, just as the discovery of new molecules or technology comes from biotech companies.

At last the time has come for big pharma and big STM to address the social pressure from their customers, which has taken the form of public health scandals involving drug manufacturers for the former, and public petitions from universities¹⁵ or activist coalitions¹⁶ against science journal vendors for the latter. Both are now reinventing themselves, and particularly their marketing strategies, by reconsidering their behaviour and integrating emergent technologies. They are also improving their brand reputations: big pharma now gives money to public health authorities for use in developing countries, while big STM donates books and science journals to the same cause.¹⁷

Big pharma and big STM are deeply intertwined: pharma customers represent 20 per cent of big STM sales,¹⁸ and the current steady fall in advertising revenues since 2008 may seriously impact the profitability and even the financial viability of publishers if they do not develop alternative business models that are aligned to compensate for these shifts (Bousfield, 2010). Similarly, big pharma is strictly dependent on scientific publishing for the research process, for the update of researchers’ knowledge and for the publicity of their products.¹⁹ Each product launch is preceded by patents and widely published reviews, and these articles have to be published in reputable and supposedly independent journals.²⁰ The vast majority of pharma researchers state that they rely upon STM content (Hydock et al., 2010), and that paid-for services provided by STM publishers help them achieve their business goals (Akel and associates, 2010). Moreover, scientists working in pharma and biopharma expect their employers to give them access to these expensive databases, which represent a competitive advantage (Akel and associates, 2006). Comparisons such as these between the big pharma and big STM sectors and their close relationship will form a thread running through this book.

This book is not a practical guide for learning how to use or implement Web 2.0 or semantic tools. Neither is it a ‘Pharma 3.0 for dummies’. It is aimed at readers who have at least a basic knowledge of the web environment and who want to understand the challenges raised by the profound changes that are currently affecting the nature of science communication, and who are curious about the effect that the life sciences industry is having on our society.

Hervé Basset,