Nowadays, the productivity of pharmaceutical companies can be measured by counting their publications. The empirical findings derived from such bibliometric analyses can then be used to reach conclusions about the state of the industry as a whole, as was done recently in a study of ‘Big Pharma’s R&D decline’. However, this was not always the case. At the beginning of the 20th century drug companies were still commonly described as ‘pill peddlers’ and publications rarely featured among their products, which were usually branded as ‘patent medicines’. While secrecy dominated these producers’ activities, which remained associated in the popular imagination with ‘quack remedies’, a new group of firms, the ‘ethical’ drug makers, sought to distance themselves from their competitors. Even though patenting continued to occupy a central role in their business activity, research, and with it publications, soon came to distinguish them from their rivals on the medical marketplace. Yet, in the last decades of the 20th century, when private companies had in that sense become more ‘academic’, public research institutions were increasingly being encouraged to patent their discoveries.

In this paper, I will give an overview of this transformation, which has seen the public and private sectors converge in terms of their research and publication strategies, but which has largely been ignored by historians of the pharmaceutical industry, who have tended to focus on firms’ patenting activities, while historians of science have been more interested in the publications emanating from public research institutions. Through the detailed case study of Imperial Chemical Industries (the ‘flagship’ of British chemical-pharmaceutical industry after World War Two), I will analyse the publication strategy of a particular British drug company, and will explore the extent to which this strategy was linked to the firm’s scientific/technical background rather than its national origin. I will then analyse the types of publication produced: not only research papers with multiple authors, but also single-authored training manuals for a wide circulation (e.g. on the use of statistics in industry), by which certain research practices were transferred from sector to sector, and models of industrial R&D were disseminated nationally and beyond. I will link what could be describe as the firm’s open publication culture to the popularisation activities carried out by some of its researchers, in particular Stephen Carter, who after leaving ICI in 1981 created one of the world’s first micrariums in Buxton, Derbyshire. The paper will end by examining the rationale behind such activities and publications, and the tensions that often arose around them between the scientific and commercial agendas of firms, which made the transformation alluded to earlier neither a linear, nor an uncontested one.