[Cz-health-sci] Merck proposal

[Diana Zuckerman]

Since Merck is a pharmaceutical company that sells medical products, and since it already offers an online version of the Merck manual for free on the Internet, anything they submit should be VERY CAREFULLY reviewed individually on a case by case basis, with the understanding that it can be edited like any other article.

Although the Merck manual has an excellent reputation, the company's reputation (particularly regarding disclosure of risks of Vioxx) is not so stellar.

If we want the Citizendium to have any credibility at all, we need to avoid any collaborations like the one proposed by Merck. 

Sincerely,
Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.
President
National Research Center for Women & Families
1701 K Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 223-4000
www.center4research.org


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Larry Sanger 
  To: 'Biology Workgroup List' ; cz-health-sci at mail.citizendium.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2:44 PM
  Subject: [Cz-health-sci] Merck proposal


  All,

  The following is a proposal we received.  I have some comments after it.

  ========
  First, let me applaud your effort to provide a wiki with content from expert
  contributors. There is a great deal of information available free online,
  though not all of it is reliable.

  Second, I propose a collaboration between Citizendium and the Merck Manuals
  department at Merck & Co., Inc. This department, of which I'm a staff member
  (Executive Editor, Electronic Publications), publishes The Merck Manual, a
  print and online textbook created by expert contributors.

  We are prepared to place links in your External Links section of Citizendium
  topics to related material in our online version of The Merck Manual. Two
  examples:

  Subject: Guillain Barre Syndrome. 
  Your page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Guillain-Barre_syndrome 
  The link in External Links would go to:
  http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch223/ch223d.html

  Subject: Otitis Externa. 
  Your page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Otitis_externa  
  The link in External Links would go to:
  http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec08/ch088/ch088c.html

  Unfortunately, we are not in a position to author material for you, but we'd
  be delighted to add value to your pages with links to our material. We
  invite you to visit The Manual at http://www.merck.com/mmpe/index.html to
  determine for yourself whether links to this content is acceptable and
  desirable. In a preliminary review, I found 40 to 50 Citizendium topics to
  which we could contribute.

  Please let me know if you are interested in such a collaboration.
  ========

  I can say (publicly on this list) that this would be welcome to me.  Merck
  has an excellent reputation, and it seems unlikely that there would be
  anything in their manuals that we should not send users to.

  More important, perhaps, is that this very small request (it's basically
  just a request to add 50 links to CZ) might be the beginning of a useful
  collaboration.

  I'm inclined to say "yes," but I wanted to get your feedback first.

  --Larry

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