Peter Clarke, PhD, played an important role in the success of Current Medical Research and Opinion, purchasing the journal for his business Librapharm Ltd in 1995. Prior to starting Librapharm, Dr. Clarke worked for Macmillan Press as a scientific book editor and then for Kluwer Academic Publishers as a publisher, handling a variety of medical publications. He studied Natural Sciences, with a specialisation in Zoology and a doctorate in Animal Parasitology, at Pembroke College (Cambridge, UK). Dr. Clarke’s father was in the British Royal Air Force, which resulted in an early cosmopolitan life as his family moved frequently within the UK and overseas. Dr. Clarke is semi-retired after selling Librapharm to Informa in 2006. Taylor & Francis, a division of Informa, now publishes CMRO.
Mithi Ahmed: please tell us about your involvement with CMRO – when did you acquire the journal and how was it faring at the time?
Peter Clarke: One of my authors at Macmillan Press – a medical doctor specialising in pharmaceutical medicine – told me about CMRO when we were brainstorming about setting up a publishing business together. In fact, the purchase of CMRO in 1995 was one of the cornerstones of the company, Librapharm. Admittedly, the journal was almost moribund by then and had only published a few papers in the previous 2–3 years. However, it was in the Science Citation Index with a low impact factor and was listed in Medline. Therefore, I felt it had some potential, and liked the concept of it.
MA: did you have a vision for the journal and if so, what was it?
PC: To begin with, the goal was to increase the amount of good content published. In its heyday, CMRO was publishing 60–70 papers a year, but by the time Librapharm acquired it, the amount of content had decreased significantly. However, I felt that the journal occupied a valuable niche: CMRO rapidly published important material from the pharmaceutical industry, and I wanted to build on this position. The aim was to publish high-quality material on a regular basis whilst maintaining the journal’s key selling point of rapid publication. I could see no reason why it shouldn’t occupy a position alongside other more “traditional” journals in its field while still retaining its unique features.
MA: can you tell us about the medical publishing field in the 1990s? How did this affect the type of content CMRO was publishing?
PC: After World War II there was a massive boom in journal publishing, with a lot of new titles being introduced by top medical and scientific publishers. However, the basic concept for 99% of the titles was the subscription-only model. in addition, many of the top journals had a very high rejection rate and quite often strict editorial guidelines as to the type of material that they were willing to publish. This often ruled out material from the pharmaceutical industry either because it was not regarded as being “novel” or because of inherent bias against the industry itself.
CMRO, along with a very small number of other journals, worked on a “page charge basis”, which was very similar to Open Access but quite unusual at the time. Initially, the journal was viewed a bit suspiciously by academic authors. However, those associated with the pharmaceutical industry understood the concept of paying for a rapid reviewing/publication system. To begin, we were targeting authors associated with the pharmaceutical industry, but I was eager to attract a broader base of material from purely academic sources when we had space to do so.
You also must remember that, in the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web was only in its infancy. Email was only just coming into existence and the fax machine was still an important means of communication. Print on paper was the only major means of communication in science and medicine.
MA: how did you and your colleagues commission/solicit papers for the journal and what kind of author groups did you target?
PC: There is no doubt that, to begin with, obtaining content was quite hard work. Initially, we targeted personnel within the pharmaceutical industry who were involved in publishing papers, such as clinical researchers and medical writers. We also focused on many of the support services that the pharmaceutical industry was beginning to use back in the 1990s, mainly the communications agencies. We would directly contact academics within the field of pharmaceutical medicine to encourage submissions.
MA: can you describe the peer review process at that time? What were the challenges you faced?
PC: Finding good, reliable peer reviewers is always difficult. We started to build a solid core of good generalists who were experienced in pharmaceutical medicine and then added specialists as and when needed. As the number of papers increased, we developed a training system for reviewers because peer review is not taught. My colleague in the US, Stan Heimberger, was instrumental in building our peer review system.
MA: as someone who has worked in medical publishing for many years, how do you think the field has changed over the last few decades?
PC: When I started in publishing in the early 1980s, there was no email, no Internet, and no personal computers. The most rapid means of communication – other than the telephone – was the telex, and some journals were still being typeset using “hot metal”. Obviously, massive changes in technology have taken place since then. And, back at the turn-of-the-century, Open Access began growing as a movement. But, in some ways, not much has changed, and the major journals still perhaps occupy a disproportionate space based on their reputation. Certainly, things like peer review do not seem to have made much progress in the last several hundred years. I assume that, in many cases, it can still take several years for an author to publish their paper once it has gone through several journals and reviewers. This is where CMRO came in, and I think it still has a very important role to play in that way.
MA: can you share some of the highlights of working with CMRO?
PC: To begin with, it was very challenging to get the journal back up and running again and then, once it began to attract more papers, it was challenging handling the growth! However, it was also extremely rewarding being thanked for publishing significant papers rapidly. You always hope that in your career you might have an impact on society, and I felt that by the time I handed over CMRO to Informa Healthcare, we had built it into a journal that published papers important to medical practice.
MA: as an original research journal, what impact has CMRO had on its readers and the research publishing industry?
PC: There are now thousands of medical journals, and my guess is that they are generating hundreds of thousands of papers a year. I like to think that CMRO has published some significant research in a very timely manner and, through its operating procedures, illustrated that it is quite possible to publish high quality research rapidly.
Transparency
Declaration of funding
None.
Declaration of financial/other relationships
PC is a minority shareholder in Bioexcel Ltd, which publishes Drugs in Context.
Acknowledgements
None.