HotTopics: Compliance And Productivity: R&D Performance Solutions Needed To Ease Pharma’s Pain Points

Authors: Bette Brunelle, Affiliate Analyst; Leigh Watson Healy, Chief Analyst

This HotTopics examines the publishing industry's response to opportunities in the life sciences industries, and the extent to which they have moved to an R&D Performance Solutions model. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are among the most information-intensive environments in business, with R&D as a core creative engine consuming huge amounts of scientific, regulatory, and market information. Business process management (BPM) vendors have been attracted to this industry with software solutions to manage the industry's complex processes, but Outsell believes the market is ripe for the next level of convergence, with next-generation process software combined with next-generation content

- content unwrapped and integrated seamlessly into workflows all along the product pipeline. This HotTopics examines the characteristics of such solutions, including unbundled content, analysis tools, embedding of content with applications, proprietary data, customization, and collaborative tools. It evaluates offerings from the Big Four STM providers

- Elsevier, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer, and Chemical Abstracts Service

- and from a few smaller and nontraditional players. For content providers targeting the life sciences industries, this HotTopics prescribes freeing content from current containers, choosing a path (safe, middle-of-the-road, or bold) and sticking to it, and focusing on perfecting channel distribution rather than protecting content brands.