Writing for Drug Eye Africa
The blog carries opinion from people who work in African medicines regulation and supply. The register carries published regulatory actions. These standards exist so that a reader never has to work out which of the two they are reading, and so that a company named in a piece knows exactly what was asserted about it and on what basis.
1. Who can write
You need a working connection to the field — not a qualification in it. A hospital pharmacist who dispenses the products this register lists is as relevant as a professor, and often closer to the problem. What is required is that your standing is checkable by a stranger, because that is what makes a signed opinion worth more than an anonymous one.
Applications are assessed on the fit between what you do and what you propose to write about. A supply-chain manager writing on procurement failure is a strong application; the same person writing on clinical pharmacology is not, and would be asked to write the first piece instead.
2. What we verify before approving you
Everything below is asked once, at application. Nothing is asked again per piece.
- Full name
- As it will be published. Bylines here are real names — pseudonymous criticism of a named manufacturer is not something this site will carry.
- Contact email
- How we reply, and how a correction reaches you later. Held privately: it is never shown on the site and never passed to anyone.
- Country of practice
- Where you actually work, which is not always where you are from.
- Role and organisation
- Your post and your employer. Published, because a reader weighing an argument about a regulator is owed the knowledge that its author works for one.
- Field
- One of eleven: regulatory affairs, pharmacy practice, pharmacovigilance, clinical medicine, manufacturing and quality, supply chain and procurement, laboratory and testing, health journalism, law and policy, academia and research, civil society.
- Years in the field
- Shown on your author page. Not a threshold — context.
- At least one public identifierrequired
- The part that does the work. Any one of: a professional register number with the council or board that issued it; an ORCID; a staff page on your employer’s own domain; published work; or a professional profile. More than one is better. We record which kind you gave and show it, because a pharmacy council registration and a LinkedIn page are not the same warrant and printing both as “verified” would suggest they were.
- Supporting statement
- 80–400 words on what you want to write about and why you are placed to. This is what is actually assessed.
- Declaration of interestsrequired
- See section 4. Required even when the answer is none.
A conflict of interest does not disqualify you. Someone who has worked inside a manufacturer’s quality unit understands a GMP failure better than most people writing about one. Concealing it is what disqualifies you.
3. Length
Two forms, and the word count is enforced when you submit rather than suggested here and forgotten.
- Comment
- 600–1000 words. One argument, made once. A response to a recall, a regulator’s decision, or something the register has just shown. The floor exists because a piece shorter than this is a social media post and does not need a byline on a register.
- Analysis
- 1000–2200 words. A pattern across records, a comparison between countries, a system that is not working. The ceiling exists because an argument that needs more than this is a paper — publish it as one and we will link to it.
- Standfirst
- Up to 300 characters. One sentence saying what the piece argues.
4. Interests, declared once and printed always
You answer four questions and write a short declaration. Four are yes or no: whether you hold employment, consultancy or shares in a pharmaceutical manufacturer, distributor or CRO; whether you hold a post with a regulatory authority; whether you have taken industry funding in the last three years; and whether you are involved in litigation on the subject you write about.
The result is stored on your author record and printed automatically under every piece you write. It is not retyped per article, cannot be omitted from one, and appears even when you have nothing to declare — a disclosure line that shows up only when there is something to admit teaches readers to skim past it.
5. What a piece may and may not assert
Yes
- Argument, judgement, criticism and disagreement — including with us
- Claims about a company sourced to a published regulatory decision
- Your own professional experience, stated as yours
- Naming a regulator’s failure to act, where the absence is shown
No
- Allegations against a named company with no published decision behind them
- Unpublished data you are not free to publish
- Clinical advice to patients
- Anything written for, paid for or supplied by a party with an interest
The register’s standing rule applies to the blog too: manufacturer profiles are built only from published regulator decisions, never from press reports or allegations. A piece may argue beyond the evidence. It may not present the argument as the evidence.
6. Corrections and withdrawal
A post that is wrong is corrected in place, with the correction stated on the piece and logged on the public corrections log. A post that has to be withdrawn keeps its URL, its byline and its date, and states the reason it was withdrawn in place of the text. Nothing is quietly removed. A blog on a register whose first principle is that records are superseded and never deleted cannot delete its own mistakes.
Anyone named in a piece may request a right of reply, and the request is logged whether or not it is granted, in the same way as for the register.
7. How submission works
There are no accounts and no passwords. When your application is approved you are sent a single submission link, unique to you. You write into it, and the piece arrives for review. This site holds no credential of yours that could be stolen from it, which for a register with a handful of authors is a better trade than a login.
Every piece is read before it publishes. Approval as an author is approval to submit, not approval to publish.