Medical Researchers Resort To File Sharing To Get Access To Journal Research

from the those-filthy-pirates dept

When you hear about file sharing and unauthorized access to information online, the view pushed by many copyright maximalists is that it's just a bunch of morally corrupt kids who don't want to pay for stuff gleefully "stealing" music and movies from those hard working entertainment industry employees. Of course, the real picture is a lot more complex. For example, apparently there's a growing community of medical researchers using file sharing to exchange information and research reports that they have trouble accessing otherwise. In the past, we've talked about the growing effort to get scientific research published in open access journals, rather than locked up in ridiculously expensive (especially given that they don't have to pay writers or even the peer reviewers) old school research journals.

While open access journals are certainly becoming a lot more popular and useful, there's still plenty of useful research that's very difficult for many to access. At least in the medical field, it looks like some researchers took a page from various private file sharing communities. Christian Zimmerman points us to a report looking at one such community that had over 100,000 registered users sharing scans and uploads of medical research reports from non-open journals via some basic forum-type software (so not really peer-to-peer... yet). The community that was looked at contained nearly 300,000 postings, with people requesting certain reports, and others delivering them.

Apparently, the system was quite effective, with nearly 83% of requests for certain articles resulting in delivery of the requested article. The analysis notes that the 83% is probably low, as there would likely have been a higher success rate if people making the requests followed the stated rules for making a request (some did not). The analysis also noted that people weren't doing this to get back at the journal publishers, but just to help each other out:

From the participants' comments made in the forums, however, there does not appear to be any vindictiveness on the part of the participants against the journals or holders of copyright, but a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance. Most remarkable, is that the activity described in this paper did not occur within closed, secure, password- and firewall-protected environments, but within open environments, easily publicly accessible, and easily searchable and referenced by general search engines such as Google.

Though, it should be noted that this particular forum apparently later did go behind a private wall. Still, it's interesting to see the parallel between this and other types of file sharing -- showing, again, that people of all types are recognizing that access to information that's out there should be a given.

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Another Example Of How Patents Skew Medical Research

from the why-bother? dept

When it comes to patents, the argument for pharmaceutical patents is a lot more compelling than for many other areas. However, as you start to dig into the details, the argument for pharma patents becomes a lot more troublesome in that it creates incentives that have little to do with improving healthcare, and quite a lot to do with what can be patented. The monopoly power granted by patents pushes all research money into only things that can be patented, ignoring other possible cures, even if they can be both profitable and quite helpful. A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).

William Stepp points us to an example of how this focus on patents has helped to hold back one doctor's promising research on a way to help heal brain injuries. The doctor in question had come across some interesting findings back in the 1960s, but one of the problems in getting support for the research was that the findings wouldn't produce a patentable pharmaceutical product. Instead, it just showed that progesterone, a natural female hormone, could help heal brain injuries. Since it's just a natural hormone, there's nothing that can be patented, and the doctor had a very difficult time finding anyone to back the research. After decades of working on it -- often completely on the side, it seems that he's finally been able to build up some support -- and it turns out that his early findings did make sense and that the results appear to work equally well in humans as in rats (his initial test subjects). This is a clearly a big discovery -- and it was delayed decades because the focus on patents obscured the bigger issue.

This is the exact same thing that is seen repeatedly in Andy Kessler's book, The End of Medicine about the healthcare system. Time and time again, it's the pharmaceutical industry and their focus on what can they patent (rather than what can be done to improve healthcare) that gets in the way of real improvements that could save lives. The focus on what can be patented, and the games played to extend patents (at great costs) means that money that should be going towards much more useful areas of healthcare get diverted into less useful, but artificially profitable, endeavors. That's what happens when you set up artificial monopolies.

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