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One World

Pharma (and often also academic) research doesn’t match public health needs

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/life%20sciences/our%20insights/the%20helix%20report%20is%20biopharma%20wired%20for%20future%20success/helix-rewiring-the-dna-for-the-next-wave-of-impact-in-biopharma.pdf?shouldIndex=false

There is also a review in the BMJ “Can medical product development be better aligned with global needs?”

Typically, market analyses are performed by pharmaceutical companies. These analyses lead to value propositions and business cases for developing new products based on technologies those companies have either developed, or for which they have licensed intellectual property. These analyses—together with assessments of “end-user” (patient) preferences, and assessments of regulatory pathways—drive research and development (R&D) investments. In traditional for-profit product R&D, the unmet medical need is factored in only partially, including through the end-user preferences and the company’s assessment of likely regulatory authority perspectives. In some cases, governments or multilateral agencies can be large scale procurers (i.e., they will purchase the product), and in this situation their preferences may be given more weight.
However, at present, only a small proportion of global health R&D spending (around 2%) is on the compelling medical problems faced by LMICs.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Philosophy

Academic freedom

Peer review kann auch Wissenschaft verhindern, wie wir gestern an dem Cosmos Artikel oder vor ein paar Tagen bei eLife gesehen haben.

Und es ist ein riesiges Problem, wie ich gerade in einem weiteren Essay bei Sandra Kostner gefunden habe “Disziplinieren statt argumentieren. Zur Verhängung und Umsetzung intellektueller Lockdowns” in ApuZ 71. Jahrgang, 46/2021, 15. November 2021.

Continue reading Academic freedom →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Peer review in peril

1 Comment

Cosmos has an interesting article

The list of retractions and editorial issues of concern, even from the most-respected peer-reviewed journals, swells daily, exposing the underlying problem of expecting peer review to act as the gatekeeper for scientific rectitude and rigour. This is a job for which it is woefully inadequate.
Academic peer review became an integral part of the scientific publishing process in the early 1970s and quickly became synonymous with trustworthiness – both of the journal and of the science itself…“One of the biggest issues in peer review is the lack of incentive to do a good job,” says medical researcher Dr Hannah Wardill, from the University of Adelaide. “There is no oversight and no training. People are just so thinly spread. None of these factors facilitate a robust and thorough peer-review system.”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Philosophy

Too many complaints about eLife

1 Comment

Following the recent announcement of eLife to overcome a accept/reject decision

We have found that these public preprint reviews and assessments are far more effective than binary accept or reject decisions ever could be at conveying the thinking of our reviewers and editors, and capturing the nuanced, multidimensional, and often ambiguous nature of peer review.

there are now many complaints

Destroying eLife’s reputation for selectivity does not serve science. Changes that pretend scientists do not care about publishing in highly selective journals will end eLife’s crucial role in science publishing, says long-time supporter Paul Bieniasz

While the announcement could have come in a more polite way – creating a second tier of an eLife archive – I believe this is a good decision.The rejection attitude  is basically driven that “your inferior paper would harm my journal impact” while it just goes to another journal. Publication is seldom stopped so it produces workload at other journals and for other reviewers in particular when the initial reviews are not public.

The eLife decision therefore breaks a vicious circle.

 

27.11.2024

Unfortunately, eLife is now starting again to reject papers. From an email that I received this month

In this case the editorial team felt that the manuscript should be reviewed by a more specialized community. Where results are principally useful within a specialised community, then it is likely that this audience can evaluate the paper themselves, so the public reviews and assessments carry less value. We also think that in these cases more specialised journals are likely to be able to find more suitable technical reviewers than eLife.
We wish you good luck in getting your work reviewed and published by another journal.

eLife is also been delisted now, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to fire Michael Eisen.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

Surveillance Publisher

Capitalized value? Personalized PDFs? DFG warning? User tracking? Forced marriage? It is incredible how scientific publishers are expanding their business. Here is a new paper

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. … The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.  

Sure, this already happens as some committees look only at lists of impact factor and grant sums. In the near future, they will switch to Elsevier`s “human ressources” management system Interfolio to compare candidates.

Founded in 1999, Interfolio supports over 400 higher education institutions, research funders and academic organizations in 25 countries, and over 1.7 million academic professionals and scholars. Theo Pillay, General Manager of Research Institutional Products, Elsevier, said: “Interfolio has a proven track record in supporting the academic community, thanks to its deep understanding of faculty needs, institutional workflows, research assessment and academic careers, combined with its agile technology and experienced leadership.

Back to the original article

the publishing giants have long profited off of academics and our university employers—by packaging scholars’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor only to sell it back to us as usuriously priced subscriptions or article processing charges (APCs). That’s a lucrative business that Elsevier and the others won’t give up. But they’re layering another business on top of their legacy publishing operations, in the Clarivate mold. The data trove that publishers are sitting on is, if anything, far richer than the citation graph alone.

Data is the new oil, indeed.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Allergy

Rotten Baby Milk

I have criticized in the past the milk industry sponsored research that is now operating at a similar scale like research funded by cigarette industry [1]. And well, it seems that I am not alone here when reading a new CEA paper “Are paediatric allergy services promoting or harming public health?”

There were increasing and excessive sales of specialized formula designed for infants with milk allergy—either extensively hydrolysed or amino acid formula. These represented 7.6% of formula sold in 2019 … Although pediatric allergy services cannot be held solely to blame for whole population trends, there is evidence that the clinical guidance used in pediatric allergy clinics might promote or exacerbate these trends. Moreover, many allergy, gastroenterology and pediatric societies and professionals routinely flaunt public health guidance from the World Health Organization by continuing to accept funding from formula companies, despite World Health Assembly resolutions that such conflictive relationships should be avoided.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
One World, Philosophy

Ist Sci-Hub legal?

Nein, ist es nicht – so das Amtsgericht München vom 31.1.2022 mit  Az:21 O 14450/17 das aber auch sagt:

Im Übrigen wird die Klage abgewiesen.

Sci-Hub ist auch nach dem jüngsten BGH Entscheid vom 13.10.2022 Az:I ZR 111/21 nicht legal, allerdings wird auch hier der Kläger abgewiesen:

Welche Anstrengungen zur Inanspruchnahme des Betreibers der Internetseite und des Host-Providers zumutbar sind, ist eine Frage des Einzelfalls.

Ist die Benutzung von Science-Hub unmoralisch? Nutzer in Afrika oder Südamerika werden diese Frage anders beantworten, als Nutzer in Europa oder Nordamerika. Continue reading Ist Sci-Hub legal? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Virchow’s experiences with epidemics radicalized him

Ed Yong speaks from the bottom of my heart in his Atlantic essay “What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?”

Virchow’s experiences with epidemics radicalized him, pushing the man who would become known as the “father of pathology” to advocate for social and political reforms. COVID-19 has done the same for many scientists. Many of the issues it brought up were miserably familiar to climate scientists, who drolly welcomed newly traumatized epidemiologists into their ranks. In the light of the pandemic, old debates about whether science (and science writing) is political now seem small and antiquated. Science is undoubtedly political,

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025