How openly accessible is pharma-sponsored research? An informatics approach

<p dir="ltr">Encore poster presented at the Virtual 17th Annual Meeting of ISMPP, 12–14 April 2021</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Objectives</b></p><p dir="ltr">Previous investigations into the open access rates of industry-sponsored research either come from individual company assessments of proprietary data, using different methods to detect the open access status of publications, or from manual analyses of pre-existing cross-company data sets (such as the Good Pharma Scorecard). Direct comparison of open access publishing rates between pharmaceutical companies has therefore not been possible. Here, we present an automated and reproducible method to assess the 2019 open access rates of company-sponsored publications across the pharmaceutical industry, using informatic technology and publicly available data.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Methods</b></p><p dir="ltr">Microsoft Academic’s application programming interface was used to report the digital object identifiers (DOIs) for the articles for which any author had an affiliation address at any of the 11 Open Pharma Member and Supporter pharmaceutical companies and any of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies by 2019 revenue using the search term ‘[Company Name] Medicine [Year]’. The analysis was repeated for Open Pharma Member and Supporter companies for 2017 and 2018. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results</b></p><p dir="ltr">The mean (minimum, maximum) open access rate for 6452 publications across 21 companies was 61% (53%, 97%; Spearman’s rank: -0.721, p = 0.0002; Figure 1). Companies with the highest expenditure for research and development (R&D) tended to produce: </p><ul><li>a lower proportion of open access publications than those with low R&D expenditure</li><li>a larger number of publications than those with low R&D expenditure</li><li>a large number of preclinical and country-level publications (data not shown).</li></ul><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions</b></p><p dir="ltr">To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of pharma-funded and pharma-authored publications using publicly available data that, in combination with informatic technologies, allows for an unbiased assessment of how open pharmaceutical publication practices are. Overall, almost two-thirds of the pharma-funded research included in our analysis were published open access – an increase of almost 20% from the last cross-company analysis, which assessed publications between 2009 and 2016. Open access publishing rates increased from 2017 to 2018 and from 2018 to 2019 for the 10 Open Pharma Member and Supporter companies included in our analysis. Our method provides a reproducible benchmark for the industry and for individual companies and could be used to encourage further uptake of open access publishing.</p>