Do journals restrict access to commercially funded research?
<p dir="ltr">Poster presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals, April 30 until May 2, 2018, National Harbor, MD, USA</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Objectives</b></p><p dir="ltr">Publishing research with open access increases the speed and transparency of research dissemination, enabling better and more efficient science and innovation in the public and private sectors. We set out to clarify the open access options available in high impact journals and assess their level of restrictiveness and whether options are limited by the research funding source.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Methods</b></p><p dir="ltr">Journals with an impact factor of at least 15 (on May 24, 2017) were identified using Journal Selector (Sylogent, Newtown, PA, USA). Information about these journals’ open access policies was collected from journal websites and by email contact between June 29, 2017 and July 26, 2017 (up to three attempts). Emails were sent to the journals between December 6, 2017 and January 2, 2018 requesting confirmation of our findings.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results</b></p><p dir="ltr">Thirty-seven journals, from 14 publishers, had an impact factor of at least 15. Open access with a CC BY license was offered by:</p><ul><li>3 (30%) of the 10 journals with the highest impact factor</li><li>23 (62%) of the 37 journals analyzed.</li></ul><p dir="ltr">Of the 23 journals that offered a CC BY license, 21 (91%) disclosed article processing charges on their websites.</p><p dir="ltr">Of the 23 journals that offer immediate open access with a CC BY license, only one journal, Acc Chem Res, had an open access policy that allowed this option for commercial funders/pharmaceutical companies.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions</b></p><p dir="ltr">The availability of open access with a CC BY license for publications in journals with a high impact factor largely depends on authors having a specific non-commercial funding source. On these terms, pharmaceutical companies are not able to publish open access with a CC BY license in many journals. To give the scientific community full access to read, reuse and adapt medical publications, publishers and academic journal editors would ideally allow pharmaceutical companies to fund unrestricted and immediate open access to publications with a CC BY license. </p>
