The New York Times article, A Medical Publisher's Unusual Prescriptions: Online Ads, talks about the web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com. The portal gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 Elsevier's medical journals. It supplements this "service" by selling advertisements against the content. Doctors must give their personal information to access the journals. The article states that Elsevier hopes to have 150,000 professionals sign up within a year. They want to attract advertising and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies, and they want to "cash in" and sell the information from doctors who signed up for the "free" journals to more advertisers.

Blah where do I begin…
I guess besides all of the ethical questions about advertising from drug companies subsidizing access to medical research literature, one of my other questions is would a doctor be willing to sign up for a service only to have their personal information resold to advertisers who will also turn around re-sell to hundreds of other companies? I have already blogged about how people are fed up with their information being available online for spammers and everybody else, giving your information to somebody who says they are going to sell it is a sure fire way to get more spam and increase your online footprint.

The other thing that bothers me is this quote in the news article, "Looking at OncologySTAT for the first time, Dr. Yi said he liked the features it offers, like chemotherapy regimens, conference reports, drug interactions and the ability to search by cancer type. 'Having it all under one roof makes it easier,' he said." The first thing that pops into my mind is… It already is under one roof! Hello, use MEDLINE! If you have privileges at a hospital then that hospital library supports you and can get you the full text of the article FOR FREE and WITHOUT annoying advertisements. Pick up a phone give your librarian a call and find out how it is done. You may be surprised to learn how easy it is.

One thing is for sure it will be interesting to see how this pans out.