Benchmarking open access in publications with authors affiliated to pharma companies and universities

<p dir="ltr"><b>Objective</b></p><p dir="ltr">Open access (OA) publishing can improve transparency and help to foster trust in research. We developed an automated method to assess OA rates and compared OA publication rates for research articles with authors from universities and pharmaceutical companies.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Research design and methods</b></p><p dir="ltr">OA rates were evaluated using The Lens (<a href="http://www.Lens.org" target="_blank">www.Lens.org</a>) for published articles with authors from either: the top 40 universities (Leiden Ranking); or the top 40 pharmaceutical companies (by R&D expenditure). OA rates were evaluated for all articles published in 2021 and 2022, stratified by therapy area (based on AI-assigned field of study, e.g., ‘medicine’) and by OA license type.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results</b></p><p dir="ltr">The OA rates of academic and industry-funded publications were similar (table).</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions</b></p><p dir="ltr">Approximately 60% of publications funded by industry and academia are OA. The decline in OA rates in 2022 may be an artefact of delayed open access embargo of articles published late in the year. This automated method provides a method for institutions to readily benchmark OA rates.</p><p dir="ltr">The bespoke dashboard we created for this comparison is free to use and is publicly available online: <a href="https://www.lens.org/lens/report/view/**Live-open-access-analysis**/14572/page/14573" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.lens.org/lens/report/view/**Live-open-access-analysis**/14572/page/14573. </a></p>