Elsevier introduces PLD solution for professionals in the life sciences

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announced the launch of a structured Product Literature Database (PLD) solution for professionals in the life sciences. The PLD solution is a further development of the QUOSA literature management solution and it enables a higher level of scalability, automation and usability. QUOSA, a content management and workflow productivity solutions provider, was acquired by Elsevier in January 2012.

PLDs are centralized repositories of product-related scientific literature maintained by life sciences institutions to meet regulatory reporting requirements, address medical inquiries and inform progress in product development. PLDs are used by a broad array of groups within life science institutions who need to access public information related to their company's and competitor's products. PLDs primarily contain information from journal and conference abstracts as well as some other public sources, for example media articles.

Michael Rai, General Manager of QUOSA at Elsevier, said, "We have recognized content management and workflow productivity to be a key strategic area in life sciences to support. Our new PLD solution both compliments our current content sources like Embase and extends ourselves to better support the workflows of end users in, for example, medical affairs and pharmacovigilance groups. We are actively engaging in end user discussions to help define how we can take the QUOSA key product components and develop superior workflow solutions for improved post market surveillance."

Elsevier has tailored and upgraded QUOSA's solution to serve the specific needs of life sciences professionals such as pharmacovigilance and medical affairs personnel in pharma, biotech and medical device companies. New functionalities include:

• Outbound email alert setting by end users. Users can set their own alerts on any search or topic area in the PLD, including alert topics created by expert information professionals.
• Enhanced scalability to support the import of hundreds or thousands of alerts from a range of external sources.
• Automated tagging of search results for most efficient management of large sets of results.
• Enhanced search interface including configurable faceted browsing of search results.
• Saved searches, both personal and public, as permanently available, up-to-date views of the PLD content.

These new features complement existing QUOSA functionality which is also essential to the PLD solution:

• Copyright-compliant full-text article archive and sharing, with full-text searching.
• Integration with Copyright Clearance Center's RightSphere^® rights advisory tool for visibility of copyright information and for conditioning related actions.
• Full-text and metadata retrieval from a wide range of sources, including normalization of the related metadata.
• Customizable metadata for internal value-add and assistance with company workflows.
• Streamlined end-user access to PDFs.
• Automated PDF availability checking to minimize document ordering costs.
• Integration with document delivery systems for acquisition and re-use of purchased PDFs

Source: Elsevier