Measuring open access to pharmaceutical company-supported articles – an improved and semi-automated method

<p dir="ltr"><b>Objectives</b></p><p dir="ltr">Open access (OA) to research published by pharmaceutical companies can improve transparency and foster trust. However, there is no publicly available automated tool to assess OA publication rates across pharmaceutical companies, or those in other sectors.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Methods</b></p><p dir="ltr">We updated a previously described methodology by introducing a new approach to identifying the type of publication (e.g. journal article, review, letter). The new approach aimed to obtain a cleaner data set by correctly identifying publication types and excluding certain formats. Conference abstracts and letters were excluded, because these are typically less likely to be OA and therefore outside the scope of most OA policies. OA rates from 2019 and 2020 for published articles that were supported by the top 20 pharmaceutical companies were analysed with the new method. Any Open Pharma Member/Supporter companies outside the top 20 were also included.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results</b></p><p dir="ltr">As expected, fewer articles were identified with the updated method (5093) than the original method (6900) for 2019. Overall OA rates in 2019 determined using the updated method were higher (76%) than the original method (69%). This suggests that abstracts and letters were successfully excluded.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions</b></p><p dir="ltr">This analysis could be used to monitor funder compliance with OA policies. As OA policies become compulsory, this analysis will give an objective measure of compliance for funders. Full automation could allow the easy assessment of changes in OA rates over time. Can be easily extended to analyse OA type (green, gold, etc.) of articles, or copyright licence type (CC BY, CC BY-ND, etc.).</p>