At today’s BioCentury Summit, FDA Deputy Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a blunt broadside to the medical journal mandarins …
“Too much important medical information remains shielded behind strict embargo policies and too long peer-review cycles that mostly serve the interests of enterprising journal editors rather than patients.
Medical journal embargo policies are the C-Section of Journalism — you can report on something at the date, and time, of your choosing. And the medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Science are pressuring everyone, including the FDA, to release information more quickly.
They are right. Information that could influence clinical medical practice needs to be made available more quickly, and more widely, after it has gone through a deliberative scientific process that firms up its meaning and the magnitude and the veracity of its conclusions.
But why should the medical journals alone have the luxury of bottling up information behind longwinded peer review processes that can wind on for months and embargo policies that serve no useful purpose?”
Let’s see what Time Magazine has to say about that!
