How open are pharma publications?

<p dir="ltr">Encore poster presented at the virtual 16th Annual Meeting of ISMPP, June 16–18, 2020</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Objective</b></p><p dir="ltr">Open access is key to improving the transparency and accessibility of research. Although the number of open access publications is increasing year on year, the overall proportion of open access publications reporting pharma-funded research remains unknown. Tools such as the Good Pharma Scorecard are useful for assessing the transparency of clinical trials. However, the scorecard does not reflect the accessibility of the corresponding peer-reviewed publications. This analysis aimed to assess the proportion of pharma-funded research that is published open access, and the types of licenses granted.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Research design and methods</b></p><p dir="ltr">Data were downloaded from the Good Pharma Scorecard public files for 2017 (533 records) and 2019 (675 records) and screened for PubMed links. Each link was accessed manually and any article that was free to read was scored as open access. License information was recorded when available.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results</b></p><p dir="ltr">The proportion of open access publications increased from 61% (159/260) in the 2017 data set to 63% (153/244) in the 2019 data set. Licensing information was available for 35% and 44% of the publications from the 2017 and 2019 data sets, respectively. The proportion of manuscripts available under the most open Creative Commons (CC) license, CC BY, doubled from 2017 to 2019. Elsevier publications were available under a single license similar to CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY‑NC‑ND). The proportion of publications available open access varied between the 11 companies assessed, ranging from 0% to 100%.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions</b></p><p dir="ltr">Open access publishing of pharma-funded research is slowly increasing, along with the proportion of publications with a CC BY license, with wide variation seen between companies. Licensing information is not widely available; however, this is also improving.</p>