50 Years On Still Relevant
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EDITORIAL
50 Years On Still Relevant Graeme Avery ONZM, KNZM1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
50 years ago there was a plethora of new drug introductions, but a dearth of sources of reliable, balanced information to aid rational prescribing decisions. Drugs was introduced in 1971 to meet this need, as the international subscription edition of a successful Austral asian controlled circulation continuing education journal on therapeutics, New Ethicals. In 1970, I had met with leading drug regulatory and prescribing education leaders in the UK, Germany and the USA to seek and receive their endorsement for Drugs—a scholarly review journal that would provide independent evaluations of the best published literature supporting the pharmacological properties, efficacy, safety and appropriate clinical use of new drug products. At the time, there was a real need for a balanced infor mation source to bridge the gap between the biases of the promotional material of the pharmaceutical company and those with bias from a different direction of Government and other publications such as for example, the Prescribers Journal and Drugs & Therapeutics Bulletin, in the UK and the Medical Letter in the USA. The first step involved establishing an International Hon orary Editorial Board of eminent clinicians who had dem onstrated their commitment to the teaching of therapeutics and the emerging specialty of clinical pharmacology. The Board, along with other specialist experts in the field of the new drug, would play a large part in the development of Drugs by reviewing manuscripts on the detailed evalua tion of new products prior to publication, and contributing review articles themselves on new drug classes and their use in therapeutics. An editorial team of in-house clinical pharmacists was recruited globally and the skills developed to analyse, evalu ate and summarise the ever increasing large volumes of data and information on each new drug. Such was the growth in * Graeme Avery ONZM, KNZM [email protected] 1
new source publications, and to be independent in source supply from the pharmaceutical industry, that an in-house drug literature retrieval system was established to index arti cles on drugs and their use in disease treatment from over 1,500 world biomedical periodicals. Pre-publication peer review of the Drug Evaluation man uscripts for Drugs was a fundamental pillar for the reputa tion of the independently authored and balanced reviews gained by the journal. As academic reviewers and clinical research trialists had their biases too, balance was achieved by review also from the medical department of the phar maceutical company. Comments from all reviewers were received and interpreted for veracity and fair balance for the final publication. This thorough peer review approach served the Drug Evaluation programme well and remains so today. Adis as the original publisher, from its headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand, because of its isolation from big pharma and big science, needed to become self-sufficient in h
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