Pharmacokinetics is currently defined as the study of the time course of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion. Clinical pharmacokinetics is the application of pharmacokinetic principles to the safe and effective therapeutic management of drugs in an individual patient. Primary goals of clinical pharmacokinetics include enhancing efficacy and decreasing toxicity of a patientâs drug therapy. The development of strong correlations between drug concentrations and their pharmacologic responses has enabled clinicians to apply pharmacokinetic principles to actual patient situations. Of particular interest are changes in kinetic parameters with dose (dose-dependent kinetics) within the recommended clinical dosing range. When appropriate, other information may include influences of demographic characteristics like age sex and race, influence of certain diseases states, influence of external factors such as meals or other drugs (drug-drug pharmacokinetics), drug binding to biological constituents like plasma proteins and RBC, studies performed in special patientâs populations and studies performed under conditions of therapeutic use.
Open access to the scientific literature means the removal of barriers (including price barriers) from accessing scholarly work. There are two parallel âroadsâ towards open access: Open Access articles and self-archiving. Open Access articles are immediately, freely available on their Web site, a model mostly funded by charges paid by the author (usually through a research grant). The alternative for a researcher is âself-archivingâ (i.e., to publish in a traditional journal, where only subscribers have immediate access, but to make the article available on their personal and/or institutional Web sites (including so-called repositories or archives)), which is a practice allowed by many scholarly journals.
Open Access raises practical and policy questions for scholars, publishers, funders, and policymakers alike, including what the return on investment is when paying an article processing fee to publish in an Open Access articles, or whether investments into institutional repositories should be made and whether self-archiving should be made mandatory, as contemplated by some funders.
Last date updated on April, 2024