In January 2022, the CCC Velocity of Content podcast covered the story when Ipsen become the first pharmaceutical company to commit to publishing, at a minimum, a 250-word plain language summary alongside all company-sponsored journal publications that include data from human studies. Our guests then included Dr. Oleksandr Gorbenko, Ipsen global patient-centricity director; Adeline Rosenberg, medical writer, Oxford PharmaGenesis; and Joanne Walker, head of publishing solutions, the Future Science Group. 

“Plain Language Summaries” are an increasingly popular communications tool for researchers, publishers, and pharmaceutical companies “to summarize the contents of a specialist research article(s) for non-specialist audiences.”

For this latest Velocity of Content interview, I spoke with Dr. Catherine Richards Golini, a healthcare publication editor with Karger Publishers. As Dr. Golini explains here in the Velocity of Content blog, “patients and practitioners alike benefit from the simplicity of PLSs.”

– Christopher Kenneally 

If the pandemic taught us anything, it was the importance of comprehensible and accurate science communication.

A plain language summary, or PLS for short, is a condensed version of scientific, technical, or medical information presented without jargon or unnecessary complexity. A PLS is written to be comprehended by people outside of the specific discipline or industry. 

Complex texts complicate. Plain language summaries explain in simple terms and translate complex science into digestible bites. Patients and practitioners alike benefit from their simplicity.

A PLS comes in various formats: it can be a short, text-only paragraph of around 200 words, something typically seen in a scientific journal. The trend, however, is moving increasingly towards the visual: infographics or animated, interactive videos. In other cases, they can run ten pages, depending on the topic.

The concept of plain language has been around since the early ’70s. It originated in the United States as a kind of push back against the gobbledygook of government bureaucratic communication. The movement swiftly spread to the legal profession with the aim of simplifying communication so that lawyers and laypeople could understand each other. By the end of the ’70s, the plain-language campaign in England had also begun.

PLSs are particularly helpful in medicine. In common with healthcare materials in general, PLSs aim to both support and foster health literacy. Literacy, the act of fluidly reading and writing, is distinct from health literacy, which is defined as the ability to find, understand, evaluate, and act on healthcare information. And while literacy underpins health literacy, a person can be literate but still struggle to understand healthcare information or ask pertinent questions in medical encounters. Some sources suggest that more than one third of Americans and one-fifth of the population of the UK have low health literacy.1,2   Similar figures have been reported for much of Europe. Good health literacy promotes effective communication with healthcare providers and effective communication includes the ability to ask the right questions, understand the responses received, express concern, worries or preferences.

Plain language summaries are also being used by healthcare professionals, to render complex topics comprehensible, and to increase their own understanding of medical specialties outside their area of expertise.

Ultimately, though, PLSs and patient materials share the same goal: to improve the health literacy of the people reading them, so that they can play a central role in their own healthcare and the healthcare of people they are responsible for. With the ever-increasing demand for accessible information, it will soon be hard to imagine a world without plain language summaries.

1. Health Literacy Fact Sheets – Center for Health Care Strategies (chcs.org). Retrieved 6 July 2023. 
2. Simpson, R.M., Knowles, E. & O’Cathain, A. Health literacy levels of British adults: a cross-sectional survey using two domains of the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ). BMC Public Health 20, 1819 (2020). 

The post Plain Language Summaries – How Science Communication is Changing appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

In this article, we’ll answer three questions from the audience about the intersection of copyright and the reuse of published material in medical communications projects.

Why do I have to request permission to reuse content in a medical communications project?

Copyright protects original works of authorship of any kind, including journal articles, books, email, social media posts, content you post online, images (including illustrations and photographs), technical drawings, figures, and infographics.

When you reuse work in your medical communications project, remember that an important principle of copyright is that the rightsholder of that original work has the right to authorize or prohibit certain types of uses of their work. In copyright law, these are known as exclusive rights and they include the right to copy, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, and make works based on the original work. When the copyright owner grants permission to use one of their works, they can include specific conditions like where the use would take place, the number of times the use can happen, etc.

For example, a rightsholder may grant permission to use a figure in a specific presentation. That permission applies only to that specific type of use — that presentation. If you also want to include the figure in a different presentation or setting, the original permission would not cover that use so you should secure permission specific to that reuse. And the rightsholder may choose not to grant permission to use the content in that manner.

If a journal article is published as Open Access, can I reuse it? 

For Open Access (OA) content, it’s important to understand that there are a number of different types of OA license under which the content is made available. For example, Creative Commons has developed 6 types of OA Creative Commons licenses that copyright owners may choose to use, with each license granting a different set of permissions for reuse under a specific set of conditions, e.g., the requirement to provide attribution, among other things. While some of these licenses authorize use for business purposes, several of them specify that reuse is allowed for only non-commercial purposes.

In addition to Creative Commons licenses, there are other OA license options, all of which have their own terms. When using OA content in medical communication projects, it is important to make sure you are using the content in a way that is consistent with the relevant OA license and your company’s own OA policies. 

What can a company do to be more copyright compliant? 

Navigating the complexities of copyright can be challenging. Here are a couple of ideas to help.  

• Appoint a copyright expert within your organization to answer employee questions.  
• Keep an updated copyright compliance policy and share it with employees and perhaps clients. If you don’t have a copyright compliance policy, CCC offers several template examples on our website, copyright.com.  
• Educate employees and clients on the importance of copyright compliance. You want to make sure you are always getting content from a known entity or legal source.   

You can also create a checklist of questions to ask when reusing content in a medical communications project. Below is a list of information you should be seeking to gather with this checklist, and some sample questions to help you do so: 

• Always confirm content is coming from a known entity or legal source. Sample questions: Where did the work come from? Was it legally obtained? Did you find it online?
• The intended type of use impacts the permissions needed and the price for reuse. Sample question: What do you want to do with the content?
• The duration and audience size should be known before seeking permissions. Sample questions: How long with the content be used? Once? For a year? 

The post Common Questions From the Intersection of Copyright and Medical Communications appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

As a long-time partner of CCC, we virtually sat down with Jane to discuss where Linguamatics has evolved from as a company, how they’re meeting customers’ ever-changing needs, and the biggest industry shakeups they’ve seen since partnering with CCC nearly a decade ago.

Tell us an interesting fact about Linguamatics that people may not know.

JR: Did you know that one of Linguamatics’ founders met Queen Elizabeth?

Linguamatics received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2014, an award for International Trade in recognition of outstanding growth in export sales across USA and Europe for its Natural Language Processing [NLP] text analytics software platform. As part of the award, Phil Hastings our Senior Director of Business Development and David Milward, one of the founders and previous CTO went to Buckingham Palace to receive the award from the late HM Queen Elizabeth.  

Linguamatics has been serving the healthcare and pharma space for many years. In a recent blog post you talk about the “healthcare data revolution.” Can you give us a brief explainer of what’s happening in the industry – and how Linguamatics is responding?

JR: The last few years have witnessed the ongoing expansion of real-world healthcare data (RWD) sources, which has been accompanied by a rise in the recognition and approval of these data by global regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and many health technology assessment agencies. The use of real-world evidence (RWE) to support regulatory decision making, such as the approval of new indications for approved drugs, has been given added emphasis by the 21st Century Cures Act (2016).

Increasingly, rich RWD sources are being used with cutting-edge analytical technologies to deliver previously unattainable insights. These new data sources and tools hold out the possibility of improving drug discovery and development processes end-to-end, addressing unmet medical needs, reducing healthcare costs, and enhancing the quality of care.  Many sources of real-world data contain large amounts of unstructured text (e.g. medical records, literature, congress reports, or even social media for patient-reported outcomes). IQVIA NLP from Linguamatics extracts the key facts, using relevant ontologies and focused queries, transforming real world data into actionable intelligence for decision making.

How are we responding?

As the understanding of the value of RWD grows, we are seeing the need to cater for a wider ecosystem of users, including expert informaticians, data scientists, or business users such as scientists and clinicians. To provide value, we have developed a broad suite of offerings to enable all these users to gain the value we know NLP can bring from unstructured text relevant for RWD and RWE.  We are working with partners – both within IQVIA and outside – to provide comprehensive solutions that customers need, integrated with our NLP. Linguamatics doesn’t need to do it all, but we do need to know who to work with, for best practice and best customer value, and we do.  

The Linguamatics I2E application delivers text mining capabilities across a broad range of application areas. Tell us a little about how I2E works.

JR: Linguamatics I2E has been our mainstay NLP product for over 20 years; more recently we have released new products such as NLP Data Factory and Human Assisted Review Tool, ideal for data scientists, expert informaticians, end-user scientists and researchers. All these products share the NLP Core Platform to tackle any sort of unstructured text and transform into structured, enriched, information. I2E itself is a powerful search tool that enables the creation of sophisticated queries than combine word, phrases, ML-predicted entities, terminologies, linguistic units, regular expressions and much more – linked together with relations that extend Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc). As well as search, I2E enables the user to “shape” their results with appropriate features extracted from source documents, and then export them to a variety of commonly-used output formats, e.g. XML, JSON, TSV, HTML, Docx, etc. Under-the-hood, the NLP Core platform is performing high-throughput processing of incoming documents which understands the fundamental elements that make up text – sentences, phrases, nouns and verbs, other parts of speech, morphology of words, and more. Our NLP also leverages a range of ontologies – all the key concepts in life science and healthcare, such as drugs, genes, diseases, with millions of terms and synonyms to enable effective search. It also recognizes chemical names, patterns of words in text and assign them as dates, dosages, mutations, measurements, etc. And if that is not enough, NLP Core exposes an API to give customers even more fine-grained control over the NLP!

Natural language processing is undoubtedly useful for data scientists and teams heavily invested in R&D outcomes. What are some areas of a business where NLP can play a big role, but is often underutilized?

JR: IQVIA NLP was founded over 20 years ago [https://www.linguamatics.com/about-us], and in the early years, much of the use focused on drug discovery, such as target identification and prioritisation, systems biology, biomarker discovery. Over time, our NLP technologies have evolved, and our customers have matured in their use of NLP. This has led to NLP playing a role across the whole lifecycle of a drug, from bench to bedside. This includes clinical trial analytics, preclinical toxicology and clinical safety, regulatory and medical affairs, health economics and outcomes research, brand and product teams, and within hospitals and health insurers, for better patient and population care.

With the focus in the last few years on digital transformation, NLP can play a big role in enabling the move from document-driven, to data-driven, decision support. For example, clinical, safety and regulatory processes are all reliant on document-heavy processes. This means organizations incur a significant manual burden, to find, read and act on the relevant information across these processes. NLP, along with other AI innovations such as natural language generation and structured content authoring, and end-to-end integration with internal data management systems can streamline many of these processes. Human-in-the-loop review and curation brings 10x or more improvements in efficiencies while maintaining quality and auditability for these critical processes.

Linguamatics has been a longstanding partner of CCC. Over these years, what do you think has changed the most in terms of the combined value our partnership brings to customers?

JR: Linguamatics and CCC have been working together for nearly a decade, to collaboratively develop valuable, scalable solutions for our clients, through the synergy of award-winning NLP and world-class content provision. Linguamatics and CCC launched their first integrated offering, a seamless integration from CCC’s RightFind XML to Linguamatics i2E, in 2016, and aim for continuous improvement in what we provide to customers.  One significant change over this time is the acceptance of the need for technology to handle text in published literature.  Although NLP has been studied for nearly a century, when Linguamatics was founded it was not commonly used within pharm discovery and development processes, and it could be hard to convince people why they needed NLP to effectively handle unstructured text. That has changed hugely over the past few years; and there is now a deep and widespread acceptance that AI technologies are needed to manage the ever-expanding velocity of content.

Interested in learning more? Check out: 

• CCC & Linguamatics i2E Integration Details 
• CCC’s RightFind XML 
• Linguamatics Products Overview 

The post 5 Questions for Linguamatics’ Jane Reed appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

• Rebecca Cook, Associate Director, Copyright and Permissions Licensing, Wiley 
• Leslie Lansman, Global Permissions Manager, Springer Nature 
• Jackie Marchington, Head of Compliance and Ethics, IPG Health Medical Communications 
• Elizabeth Jennings, Associate Editorial Director, Lucid Group 

The panelists drew on their respective decades of experience to answer questions submitted by the audience, and the discussion covered a range of topics regarding reuse in medical communications projects, including when copyright permission is needed and common use cases around permissions. 

Below are some common myths about copyright in medical communications that were addressed during the webcast, as well as responses by the expert panelists: 

Myth 1 — You can always redraw or reimage tables and figures without a license. 

Rebecca Cook, Wiley: 

“I think what we need to clarify here is what we mean by redrawing. And, if by that you mean you’re going to copy it in some way, you’re going to reproduce something that looks very similar to the original version with maybe a few amendments, or you’re getting it nicely reconfigured digitally, what you’re not really doing, then, is redrawing a figure. In the copyright sense, you’re reproducing that figure, and that means that permission is required.” 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

How medical communications professionals and rightsholders interpret tracing of a figure can vary quite a bit. One publisher may consider tracing adaptation, but another could have a different stance. It’s important to share with each publisher how you intend to reuse the figure. “Let’s not put ourselves or our clients at risk,” Jennings advised. 

Leslie Lansman, Springer Nature:

Remember that not all adaptations are the same. Lansman shared that on occasion agents contact her with adaptations that only incorporate unprotected elements of the original figure. In such situations, permission is not required, but it can be difficult to judge. She advises that it’s always best to reach out the rightsholder with your questions: “We are on the side of transparency.”   

Myth 2 — If you buy a license for content, you never need to buy another one. 

Jackie Marchington, IPG Health Medical Communications: 

When you secure a permission, you provide specific details about how you intend to reuse the content, the number of people who will view the content, etc. Those factors are considered when the rightsholders determine whether to grant the license and at what cost. If you then want to reuse the content in another way, the details of the reuse scenario change and therefore could impact the publisher’s licensing and pricing decisions.   

Rebecca Cook, Wiley:  

When it comes to licenses and permissions, the reuse rights you’ve secured are a matter of contract law. “If you have a license that stipulates that it’s tied to a specific use case, that’s what that license is going to cover,” Cook explained. “As rightsholders, we want to be flexible while making sure that the type of use is covered effectively in the license.” 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

“As you’re going through the project, what you’re initially planning may change,” Jennings said. Be as clear as possible upfront but go back to the publisher for guidance if you need to amend the reuse details, she advised. 

Myth 3 — If a Creative Commons license is available, you don’t need further permissions. 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

According to Jennings, people often make the mistake of considering Creative Commons as a green light to reuse content without seeking permission from the rightsholder. However, there are many types of Creative Commons license, which determines how content can be reused. “You have to look really carefully to determine whether the specific Creative Commons license allows reuse on a commercial basis, which is where MedComms most often fits in,” she explained. 

Rebecca Cook, Wiley: 

The question commercial versus non-commercial often comes up in the context of Creative Commons licenses. “Whether an activity is generating revenue or not is not the determining factor as to whether most rightsholders would consider an activity as being commercial,” Cook said.  

Cook cautioned against assuming internal training and educational presentations are non-commercial. “In reality, most rightsholders would consider anything that involves either the direct financial gain for an organization, or even indirect financial gain for an organization, as falling outside the scope of a non-commercial Creative Commons license,” she said. “When in doubt, double-check, because each rightsholder will have a different interpretation.” 

For more information, check out the full recording of the panel discussion now to watch an in-depth discussion of the above myths and get answers to many common questions about reuse in medical communications.

The post Addressing Common Reuse Questions in Medical Communications appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

With so many competing priorities and limited resources, many small to medium businesses (SMBs) may not be thinking about how their information assets are organized, how individual employees are accessing published articles, or the potential risk associated with whether they have the appropriate rights to do so. Even in companies with a dedicated information manager, there comes a point when manually fulfilling requests for published content and confirming rights to reuse that content is no longer feasible, and opportunities are missed to optimize content spend and utilization without the right tools in place.

Whether just launching your information management strategy or looking to take yours to the next level, securing automated, centralized literature management software can provide many benefits to your company such as:

• maximizing the value of your content investments
• streamlining and promoting companywide access to content
• reinforcing copyright compliance
• accelerating the flow of research to drive innovation

If you and your company have decided it’s time to invest in a literature management solution, here are the top questions you should ask when beginning your search.

1.  Was the software designed for the corporate market?

While there are many great information management software tools on the market today, some were created for academic or individual users and therefore may not be able to meet the specific needs and unique workflows of corporate teams including medical affairs, regulatory affairs, R&D, and more. Be sure to research the company that built the software and for whom they built it, as well as what is shaping their product roadmap.

2.  Is the ability to check permissions fully integrated in your workflow?

While many literature management tools claim they offer an ‘integrated view of copyright permissions,’ different vendors take different approaches to this critical task. Some solutions place a link next to articles that requires the user to manually look up information on available licensed rights using a separate tool. The user may even be required to search again in that second tool in order to check reuse rights information for the relevant content. In comparison, other vendors offer the ability to see accurate licensed rights information at the article level throughout their tools. The difference can make or break a user’s willingness to check content use rights and support an organization’s copyright compliance efforts. Simplifying access to detailed information on copyright permissions for individual users at the point of use not only saves valuable time for busy team members but makes ‘doing the right thing’ as easy as possible.

3.  Does the solution offer flexible billing options that meet your needs?

While it’s common for companies to provide centralized access to content from one place, many companies still require the ability to track spend at various levels. For example, does your company need the flexibility to allow certain teams or departments to pay for their own orders, or pay via credit card? Often when an information management team is responsible for their entire company’s literature management system, they must allocate costs to different departments that are the ultimate budget holders. To simplify this process, look for a solution that provides flexible tracking fields, cost controls, and the ability to split invoices to facilitate chargebacks to different teams, departments or cost centers as needed.

4.  What level of content reporting does the solution provide?

Hand in hand with your ability to invoice charges to the right place is the ability to monitor usage and spend at a granular level. As more companies look to make data-driven decisions, technology can offer a clearer understanding of how users are interacting with content and what content is most valuable for your company. Some tools provide simple order history reports, while others offer granular, customizable reports on usage as well as powerful visualizations that bring together COUNTER statistics across publisher platforms. Some can even support budget forecasting with analytical and predictive tools. Look for a solution that provides you with the data you need to identify strategic content requirements, spot coverage gaps and demonstrate return on investment for your content spend.

5.  How well does the solution handle your direct publisher agreements?

Subscriptions can be complicated, but a comprehensive literature management solution should provide clear insight into every level of subscription management from simple site licensing to the persnickety details of rolling embargoes. An even stronger solution will integrate seamless access to content for users companywide or from site licenses, as well as access to content through pre-paid transactional agreements (tokens) you have put in place. Also, be sure to ask if the solution you are considering provides users with access to actual copies of the content they requested, or if users are simply sent to external websites, on which they will be expected to resolve access issues themselves.

Access our tip sheet for the complete 10 Questions to Ask When Searching for a Corporate Literature Management Solution and see how CCC’s award-winning RightFind Enterprise solution addresses these questions and more.

In the life sciences alone, over 900 companies use CCC products and services. Learn more about how we are meeting the needs of users in corporate environments from startup biotechs to the largest global pharmaceutical companies, across all stages of development with RightFind.

The post 10 Questions to Ask When Searching for a Corporate Literature Management Solution appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

A big challenge for major pharma companies these days is to systematically spot promising new ideas from universities and biotechs. The days when a pharma company could base its future on discovering a few new drugs are gone, so to grow a pipeline of new drugs, companies explore new therapy areas and technologies. And in these new areas, even the best companies need input from scientists around the globe. However, the sheer amount of new data coming out makes it impossible to go over everything manually. On a weekly basis a researcher in diabetes, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) or heart disease could easily face 500 new publications, patents, grants, or start-ups that all look relevant on the surface.  

So how do you systematically screen and uncover the most relevant candidates for further review by scientists? 

“Can you build it?”

This was the challenge my colleagues and I were facing when the Head of Early Research contacted the information department a few years ago. “Can you build it? What do you need to get there?”

“Of course we can,” my director said, assembling a team of great information scientists with competencies in surveillance, natural language processing (NLP), information sources, and our therapy areas. To make it all come together I was asked to project manage, a huge – but exciting – challenge for an information professional who has spent most of his career in the intersection between information and IT.    

Now, to create the systematic surveillance requested, we needed three things: 

1. Content from a broad range of sources 
2. An effective way to filter the content 
3. An efficient way to share the relevant content 

When it comes to sources, obviously literature, database pipelines, and patents come to mind, but as the early bird catches the worm, conference presentations, tech transfer offices, and news about startups can be interesting additions to extract new ideas and insights.  

It’s not “just” a search

We wanted to create streams of information targeting specific groups of researchers – maybe even individuals. However, we could not “just” search traditionally because what would be our starting place? When we look for something new – potentially groundbreaking – we do not know the name of the company, the drug, the mode of action, or the gene target.  We just know the overall therapy area and we would want to look at anything in the early phases that can be considered novel.   

To help narrow down the results, a mix of NLP, artificial intelligence (AI), and human review was applied. 

• Using a text mining tool, we could extract key concepts like companies and gene names from the texts. The entity extraction pulls out gene names, drug names, company names and helps normalize them according to ontologies. Suddenly, we had structured data that could be sorted, linked, and reviewed in Excel-like columns rather than thousands of bits of unstructured text.    
• AI helped to determine how similar a new piece of text was to something previously deemed interesting. This looked at the linguistic fingerprint of incoming articles and compared it to training sets. It is far from perfect – but still provides an indication as information. For example, later stage clinical activities would have a different fingerprint than the ones we were looking for on very early exploratory science.  
• Human review is still very valuable as added experience and common sense to override the AI when it´s wrong. An expert with extensive experience in the field will start to see patterns and can alert scientists to these.  

The end result was highly curated newsletters with the most relevant opportunities. These were shared broadly – not just among core scientists – but anyone who was able to give input on the quality and feasibility of the ideas coming in.  Now, a few years later, the service has expanded to eight business areas with good feedback, but the demand is even bigger. Now, the challenge becomes how to scale it – big time.  

Can you do double the work in half the time?

Once we had a working solution, we began turning our attention to scalability. The question became “Can we do double the work in half the time?” We thought we could, but – only if we did it differently.  

Human curation is expensive and limits the ability to scale into new areas as needed.  We already implemented a couple of machine learning algorithms in the process to help rank and extract key points from the unstructured text.  But how could we get AI one step closer to human performance?  

Imagine:  

• What if the algorithm was instantly aware that we have worked on this target before?  
• What if it could see the similar drugs competitors have in the pipeline at this very moment?  
• What if it could see if a piece of news makes a splash on social media?  
• What if it could see the credibility of the research group behind the publication?    
• What if we could see a timeline for the company or research group based on what has been picked up before? 

And what if this information is used to rank and present incoming data?: 

• Would we be able to rank content more efficiently?  
• Would researchers be able to review  more content faster?  
• Would we make better decisions on what to dig deeper into? 

Tantalizingly, all the data needed for this already exists. However, there are practical barriers in terms of access, licensing, and different user interfaces. It is very time consuming to check each source manually. As a result, the information adding value rarely comes into play and doesn’t help decision making. 

What we should aim for is presenting any new piece of information with the context we already have available.  To get there, we need to link and integrate the incoming data to data from existing internal and external systems. Think of this as a fun but challenging job for information professionals, scientists, and developers in collaboration.  

The end result will speed up evaluation and opens opportunities to present large amounts of data to scientists in dynamic ways according to their preferences.  You might even consider building a profile around each scientist to learn about these preferences.  

For the scientist, the value is having the latest opportunities match their preferences served on a regular basis. And when it is served with enough context to make a more informed decision, we impact the core process of early discovery.  In pharma, good decisions and time equal money both saved and gained since we then focus resources on the best possible opportunities rather than going into the lab with something that has already failed elsewhere.  

Do you need surveillance too?

If you find yourself in a similar situation – looking for scalable surveillance that helps you effectively identify the most relevant candidates to fill your pipeline – my first suggestion to you would not be to build everything from scratch. Instead, you can evaluate new systems appearing in the marketplace. When looking for a solution, ask yourself these key questions: 

• What kind of content is key for your users?  
• If you cannot find it all in one place: What kind of integrations with other data (internal or external systems) would you need?  
• How automated should it be vs. how much noise can you live with in the alerts?  
• What options do you have to deliver targeted information to key groups in your company?    

CCC’s RightFind Suite offers robust software solutions to fuel scientific research and simplify copyright anytime, anywhere, including personalized search across multiple sources of data for highly relevant discovery, and scientific articles to power AI discovery. CCC’s deep search solutions offer all the market intelligence you need, without the noise.

Related Reading: 

• 3 Tips to Incorporate Full-Text Articles into Your Data Pipeline 
• Using a Knowledge Graph to Identify Researchers & Key Opinion Leaders 
• Accessing and Analyzing Relevant Content in Today’s Information Chaos  

The post Can Info Pros Impact a Global Pharma Company’s Pipeline? Yes. Here’s How appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Most reference management tools are unavailable on PowerPoint and do not cater to the needs of knowledge workers within corporations, but instead focus on features needed by individual, academic researchers. We saw this gap in the market and wanted to develop a solution for corporate medical and scientific writers to incorporate reference management into their familiar tools and workflows. After speaking with small, medium, and large enterprises, we are excited to offer distinct workflows that resonate across all organizational sizes when citing content within PowerPoint.

For example, Medical Information and Medical Communication teams have stressed how important it is to manage references within PowerPoint. These groups frequently communicate with various stakeholders including healthcare professionals (HCPs), regulatory authorities, and key opinion leaders (KOLs), which require responsive educational materials to be made that break down the mechanism, administration, and effectiveness of the drug/medical device available within the company’s portfolio. All of these artifacts require citations to be added consistently and accurately across slides that adhere to regulatory guidelines set forth by the FDA and EMA. Citing meaningful and accurate references alongside these claims helps establish credibility on how the solution is able to treat the problem at hand.

“Time is of the essence when communicating with healthcare professionals. Software that simplifies the authoring experience can be a major win for these responsive teams, and integrating reference management into PowerPoint helps teams to be more efficient and consistent when supplying HCPs with the critical information they need,” said Lauren Tulloch, VP & Managing Director of Corporate Markets at CCC.

RightFind Cite It’s functionality within PowerPoint enables medical and scientific writers to:

• Search for references across the RightFind catalog of 155+ million citations
• Cite references with ease from personal, shared, or company libraries
• Insert and re-order references on slides and have the bibliography update automatically
• Consolidate the bibliography in the footnotes of each slide
• Easily update the citation style on one slide or all slides at once
• Edit references or create new references directly within PowerPoint
• Order full text with appropriate re-use rights for cited references directly from a slide

Within CCC’s RightFind Suite, RightFind Cite It and RightFind Enterprise come together to make a powerful reference management tool for Microsoft Word or PowerPoint on Windows and Mac. Having this accessibility and consistency across products allow corporate medical and scientific writers to develop content in a collaborative and copyright compliant environment.

CCC’s award-winning RightFind research solution is used by hundreds of global R&D teams and other corporate content users from the smallest emerging life sciences companies to the largest global R&D organizations. Learn more about how CCC’s RightFind Suite can provide solutions to support your organization’s content and research needs.

Continue reading about the importance of integrated reference management with these suggested blogs:

Exploring the Added Benefits of an Integrated Corporate Reference Management Tool

5 Considerations When Choosing a Reference Management Tool for a Corporate Environment

The post CCC’s RightFind Cite It Reference Management Software Now Available for PowerPoint appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Rather than jumping between applications to complete an assignment, having an integration between the Microsoft Suite, your reference manager, and your broader literature management software allows you to search for references through different sources and get quick access to full text. These integrations can improve a researcher’s efficiency and overall user experience when authoring content. Since they are already familiar with these tools, it can also result in higher user satisfaction and better employee retention since there would be less training required. Within this blog, we will dive into three areas where integrated reference management workflows can benefit your  organization.

Search for References Directly within Microsoft Word

The first step in citing references is being able to discover them.

• Make sure to invest in a reference management tool that can seamlessly allow you to search for references within your personal library or your team’s shared library.
• Search for references should not be limited to what’s available within your reference manager’s libraries alone. There should also be an option to search for references online, thereby increasing your chances of finding the right reference needed. Maintaining this workflow all within Microsoft Word or PowerPoint is a major benefit to researchers as they will spend less of their valuable time jumping between applications to locate references.
• When a reference is cited and you notice inconsistencies in the author or title metadata, having the option to update the reference’s metadata directly within Microsoft Word can be an even more valuable feature. Once updates have been made to the citation, it should be updated automatically throughout the entire document.

Keeping researchers within Microsoft Word or PowerPoint as much as possible when authoring content can improve focus, delivery time, and citation accuracy.

Order Full Text Documents with Appropriate Re-Use Rights

Once you have found the reference you need and it has been cited within the document, being able to order that reference’s full text directly within Microsoft Word or PowerPoint can reduce manual processes for regulatory affairs and drug safety professionals especially. This component comes into play when regulatory submissions are made to agencies like the FDA, EMA, and PMDA – all of which require any cited document to be attached to the regulatory submission.

• Having a reference manager that can place orders and provide the full text for cited references within a document using an integrated workflow can save these responsive teams significant time and effort when needing to procure these documents.
• Additionally, if the reference manager can recognize how the content can be re-used and provide an option to obtain the correct re-use rights, then this can save the organization significant time, resources and potential risk of infringement.

Responsive teams have to provide timely responses, so any time that can be saved through reference management automation should be taken into consideration.

View Citation Full Text Documents & Annotations

Once the full text has been acquired, there should be an easy way to link to it directly through Microsoft Word. This can be especially important when documents are being authored by multiple team members. For example, a colleague within the team might want to know the reasoning behind a reference being cited. By default, Microsoft Word allows users to highlight a citation and leave a comment, but this does not give team members a view of the full text.

• A simple solution would be if a team member could click on a citation and be redirected to the full text.
• When the full text is visible there should be options for team members to leave annotations, such as being able to highlight relevant sections and add comments for other team members to view and respond. This feature can provide efficient workflows within collaborative teams by allowing colleagues to see when citations have been added to a document, by whom, and the reason it was added.

Providing this level of alignment can reduce errors and confusion when authoring content – even when teams are remote.

In Summary

No matter what team you come from within the medical, pharma, or life sciences fields, having access to a corporate reference manager that automates processes and integrates with tools with which your team members are familiar, specifically Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, can save your organization critical time early on and improve the user experience when utilizing the tool to accomplish their goals.

In the life sciences market alone, over 900+ companies use CCC products and services. With a roadmap driven by R&D-intensive industry leaders, we are dedicated to meeting the needs of users in corporate environments. The two solutions we have available within the RightFind Suite are RightFind Enterprise & RightFind Cite It which come together to address your reference management needs and were built with the enterprise user in mind.

RightFind Enterprise’s integrated reference management capabilities are available through Microsoft Word or PowerPoint on Windows and Mac. This connection allows researchers to easily discover new references or find saved references within their organization’s library – all within their authoring workflow. Once a reference has been cited, researchers can view or order that citation’s full text, view information on the document’s re-use rights, and if team members have made any annotations.

If you would like to continue learning more about what these solutions have to offer, please visit our RightFind Suite page or view these related blog posts:

5 Considerations When Choosing a Reference Management Tool for a Corporate Environment

Why Scientific Literature and Copyright Compliance Are Essential to Medical Affairs

The post Exploring the Added Benefits of an Integrated Corporate Reference Management Tool appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

This webcast series was created by CCC to help facilitate important conversations on critical topics related to standards. And based on the number of people joining us, it is clear there is much to say, whether you are in the standards development organization (SDO) community, in corporate research and development and use standards in your daily work, or in government and helping to guide public policy. Judging by the participation in the Sustainability webcast in particular, and in this series overall, that our community is deeply invested in the topic and looking to achieve very high goals and meaningful outcomes. The sustainability agenda is now worldwide and mainstream, albeit wrapped up in politics and differing points of view.

Our first speaker, Holly Elwood, is a Senior Advisor for the EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program, which helps federal agencies factor the environment into purchasing decisions. The US federal government is using its massive purchasing power to bring about change throughout the supply chain in a number of ways:

• Since 1993, the EPA has been directed to help use the power of the federal pocketbook to catalyse a more sustainable marketplace;
• The Biden Harris Administration and several statutes are directing federal purchasers to procure more sustainable products and services; and
• Executive order 14057 sets a goal of Net Zero Emissions Procurement by 2050 and directs purchasers to buy products meeting certain Recommendations of Standards and Ecolabels.

Ms. Elwood coordinates EPA and interagency technical input into product sustainability standard development efforts and helps shape and maintain EPA’s Recommendations of Standards and Ecolabels for Federal Procurement. She and her team have found that the federal procurement community and all purchasers need assistance in determining which products and services are more sustainable than others.

“[With over] 460 sustainability standards and ecolabels…in the marketplace today…sifting through these to determine which ones apply…and which ones are clearly effective and credible…can be very daunting to purchasers…our recommendations are intended to address that issue and give purchasers one place to go to see a set of recommended standards and ecolabels that have already been vetted by EPA and our sister agencies.”
– Holly Elwood

The EPA has established a framework for making assessments of sustainability, and publishes Recommendations of Specifications, Standards, and Ecolabels based on this framework. On the webcast, Ms. Elwood noted that the sheer volume of standards and ecolabels – well over 460 at this writing – making vendor selection a daunting prospect. Her organization is creating recommendations that give preference to multi-attribute, life cycle-based standards and ecolabels that address key impact areas. They are looking carefully for opportunities where product conformance is determined by a competent third-party certification body.

Ms. Elwood was careful to note that this is a process, and that input is welcome. The audience – and readers of this blog – are welcome to communicate with her team. She invited those who are aware of a sustainability standard or an ecolabel but aren’t sure about its credibility to contact them.

The US Federal government is clearly driving extensive and far-reaching change and using standards, where they exist, to support sustainability. Other governments and larger organizations around the world are either implementing or have implemented similar mandates. The importance and relevance of standards as a force for change in sustainability is only going to grow.

Future posts in this series will summarize the remarks of speakers Maike Luiken, Planet Positive 2030 Initiative and Holly Neber, CEO of AEI Consultants.

This webcast was supported by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration’s Market Development Cooperator Program.

The post Workflow of the Future: Standards & Sustainability Part 1 appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

CCC: Tell us an interesting fact about Biorelate that people may not know.  

DJ: Before Biorelate launched Galactic AI™ to automatically capture data from text many of our approaches to data curation were semi-automated. We had developed software to curate data from text, but it was often too inaccurate to be used for analysis. So, our original approach was to use software to capture data and then display it on an in-house interface that biomedical curators could decide if it was correct or not. All the checked data was then used as feedback to make the software better. With that feedback mechanism we eventually surpassed a quality threshold, and the checks were no longer needed.  

CCC: Biorelate helps scientists solving the most difficult biomedical challenges of today. What are some of the trends and evolutions you’re seeing across pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies when it comes to drug discovery?  

DJ: When Biorelate started nine years ago biopharma essentially had bioinformaticians and computational biologists. Today you see data scientists, data engineers, cloud architecture experts and all sorts of highly specialized tech roles. This is a clear sign that the industry has become much more data driven. Data is now being seen as an asset that is used end-to-end across the clinical trials spectrum. I expect this trend to continue with an even greater emphasis on decision intelligence. What companies should be seeking to do more of is to understand much earlier in the drug discovery timeline how their drugs work. It is no longer viable to run many drug discovery programs in tandem under the blind hope that one or two drugs might work, while 70-80% of others fail. The cost is simply too great. The mantra now is very much fail-fast, which means doing much more truth seeking much earlier in the process to check off the success factors quicker. Good data is the way to empower this mantra. 

CCC: If you had one piece of advice for data science and computational biology teams exploring drug discovery, what would it be?  

DJ: It would be to carefully consider the quality and relevance of the data they are using. To gain useful insights and make accurate predictions, it is important to use high-quality, well-curated data that is relevant to the problem at hand. It is then important to forge deep collaborations with experts in the wet lab setting and crucially the specific therapy area of interest. Together this is a powerful combination that can lead to faster and more successful drug discovery.  

CCC: Biorelate is known for helping companies curate biomedical data and knowledge. Tell us a little about your proprietary AI platform, Galactic AI™, and how companies are using it today.  

DJ: We’ve built Galactic AI™ to automatically, and accurately, capture highly valuable biomedical data from text that’s typically not available in existing databases. A great example of this is cause-and-effect data that describes relationships between biomedical entities. This data is mostly unavailable and hugely incomplete within existing databases, yet it is very useful for a wide range of drug discovery challenges, particularly target selection and biomarker discovery. Cause-and-effect is also very difficult to mine with software. However, we’ve focused on solving these tough curation challenges and Galactic AI™ is the culmination of many years of hard work and innovation. The ability to accurately capture entities, their relationships and directionality, all in context, is no mean feat. 

Furthermore, we’ve really focused on the way teams want to access and interface with the data Galactic AI™ captures. Teams can use Galactic Web to browse and search data and insights directly. Or they can tap straight into the Galactic API or even download the entire dataset directly with Galactic Data. This is much more fitting with how teams today want to use data like this.  

CCC: Here at CCC, we’re thrilled to have RightFind XML integrated into Biorelate’s Galactic AI™ platform. Can you share how you expect this partnership to benefit our customers? 

DJ: Quite simply it will give our customers access to even more highly valuable data to empower their drug discovery even further. One of the great things about Galactic AI™ is its ability to process any source of biomedical text. We have recently introduced Galactic Platform, which lets customers process their own internal text alongside the millions of text sources Galactic AI™ contains by default. Customers often already have access to millions of closed access literature sources, however there are very often problems with mining rights and standardization. The partnership with the CCC dramatically simplifies this process by allowing customers to access closed access content from CCC in a standard format, which can then immediately be processed by Galactic AI™. It’s really great to be working with CCC to enable this and we’re very excited to start the partnership.  

Interested in learning more? Check out: 

• CCC & Biorelate’s Strategic Integration Announcement 
• CCC’s RightFind XML  
• Biorelate’s Galactic AI platform  

The post 5 Questions for Biorelate’s CEO and Founder Daniel Jamieson appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.