Crowd Sourced Creative Commons Drug Information Pitfalls & Opportunities for Pharma
Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry faces an onslaught of crowd sourced information about its products on the Internet. Sometimes, drug companies actively seek input and insights from the “crowd” online. Brad Pendergraph (@bradatpharma), former Senior Manager, Consumer Digital and Social Engagement at Novartis, asked “Is pharma really going to let some of its information ‘go general’?” He mentioned “creative commons” and “taking a look at what material you [pharma] have and figuring out how you can distribute it to people in the social media space in ways that they can understand and work with that are still compliant.”
The most visible and most accessed example of crowd sourced “creative commons” information is Wikipedia where “wikipedians” — i.e., people who write and edit Wikipedia pages — create drug information pages such as the one about rosuvastatin. Whether or not it is “beneficial” for pharma company employees to edit Wikipedia information about their own company’s products is difficult to know for certain. This article summarizes the pros and cons of pharmaceutical companies editing Wikipedia articles to correct “misinformation” about their drugs.
Topics include:
- Open Innovation
- Sidebar: Definitions
- Beneficial Creative Commons Drug Information
- Introducing Clinical Open Innovation (Lilly Clinical Open Innovation)
- The Wikipedia Conundrum
- User-Generated Content Transparency
- Official Pharma Wikipedians?
- Consumer Unfriendly Wikipedia
- Survey: Should Pharma Edit Wikipedia Articles?
- Sidebar: PhRMA’s Views on Correcting “Misinformation”
- Who Determines What is “Misinformation”
- Role of FDA, PhRMA, and Wikipedia Itself
- Advice for Pharma Wikipedia Editors
- Bad Pharma Wikipedians
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Pharma Marketing NewsEmail Addr: 
PMN117-02
Issue: Vol. 11, No. 7
July 26, 2012
Word Count: 5507
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