Code ORANGE: The Orange Book Archives Have Arrived!
June 10, 2020
FDA’s recent announcement (see our previous post here) that after 40 years the Orange Book may get a bit of a facelift – as well as a comment in a new draft guidance that folks could obtain prior editions of the Orange Book through the Freedom of Information Act – got us thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice if the entire Orange Book – that is, all of the prior editions and supplements from the 1979 draft edition to the current 2020 BPCIA Transition edition and beyond – were available online so that folks could see how the publication has evolved over the past 40 years?? So we’ve gone ahead and done just that. Please give a warm welcome to the Orange Book Archives!
The Orange Book Archives is the culmination of several years’ worth of work at hunting down each of the annual editions and supplements and then scanning them into PDF format. We are still missing a few of the monthly supplements from the early 1980s. So if you happen to have one of them handy, please send us a PDF so that we can add it to the collection. We will add the missing supplements from 2002 and 2003 once COVID-19 stay-at-home orders are lifted and we are allowed to return to the office.
Putting together the Orange Book Archives has been a labor of love . . . and probably not so different than trying to put together a full set of the difficult-to-find 1933 Goudey baseball cards. Along the way we had help from some folks, including Bruce Pokras (now Editor-in-Chief of the Orange Book Companion), Erika Lietzan (Associate Professor of Law, University of Missouri School of Law), and the Office of Generic Drugs, which allowed us to borrow Donald Hare’s Orange Book collection (Don is the Father of the Orange Book and passed away earlier this year). Of course, we supplied FDA with a copy of the collection we assembled.
We hope you enjoy the Orange Book Archives as much as we enjoyed putting together the collection. Over time, we will try to make modifications and add extra materials related to the Orange Book, such as historical versions of the Reference Listed Drugs by ANDA Reference Standard List and the Orange Book Patent Listing Dispute List.