A pharmaceutical company has asked me for advice, and I would appreciate WAME members' help. I also thought the topic might prove interesting to discuss.

The company has completed several studies that have been published only as abstracts at meetings. The investigators are not interested in writing up the results themselves. The studies are no longer of high priority to the company (and some were completed several years ago), so it is reluctant to invest a lot of time and money preparing full papers for each study.

(Even 'wealthy' drug companies work within budget constraints, and most writers would expect to charge for 7-10 days work to develop a paper with the investigators. If the company then submitted the papers to an open-access journal, they might expect to pay around $500-$1500 per paper in publication charges.)

I understand that the results, while not earth-shattering, include some new findings that have not been shown before.

The company wishes to know whether a peer-reviewed journal would accept short reports of these studies. Alternatively, they suggest posting short summaries on their website.

My initial reaction is that publication in an independent peer-reviewed journal is always preferable to posting on corporate websites. I would therefore like to encourage the company to fulfil its obligation to publish its findings.

What would journal editors advise?

Liz Wager
Publications Consultant, Princes Risborough, UK

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Short reports of clinical trials seem to be read more often than full papers by interested clinicians.

As long as the report is not too short and does not miss out data I feel this is a good way to go rather than have results on the company web site.

At least a short report would be peer-reviewed.

Margaret Rees
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the British Menopause Society

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I understand that the results, while not earth-shattering, include some new findings which have not been shown before.

The question is, how useful are these results to the end-users (journal readers)? Just being new doesn't mean they make a useful contribution to what is known about the subject (to quote one of the BMJ's text boxes).

Then again, "useful" is for each individual reader to decide. If we stripped out of the literature everything that wasn't useful (assuming that anything that was never cited wasn't useful—which deserves a separate discussion), we'd reduce the literature by about 80% apparently!

If the results are already a bit dated and the motivation to enlarge someone's CV is not there either (not a legitimate reason for publishing, but unfortunately a very real one these days), it's probably best not to throw the manuscript into an already overloaded peer-reviewing system and just publish the results on the company's own website. They don't need to be "short summaries" in this medium, but can be as long, detailed, and carefully written as resources allow for.

Karen Shashok (Karen Jane Shashok Richardson)
Granada, Spain

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