Open Pharma quarterly update: January–March 2025

Sophie Nobes

We’ve had a busy start to the year at Open Pharma, kicking off our 2025 events with participation in an Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) webinar titled Open access funders and enablers outside the library: fresh perspectives and lesser-heard voices. Valérie Philippon (Global Head of Scientific Communications, Medical Information & Medical Learning at UCB) kindly represented Open Pharma at the webinar, providing attendees with information about the role of pharma companies – and Open Pharma – in enabling open access publishing.

Also in January, we attended our first conference of 2025 – the European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP). ISMPP always provides a valued opportunity for us to catch up with our Members and Supporters in person and discuss the importance of improving transparency in the communication of pharma-sponsored research with new colleagues. We were delighted to present the results of our recent survey as a poster titled Use of plain language summaries by healthcare professionals: an Open Pharma survey. The survey found that plain language summaries help communicate scientific research to time-poor healthcare professionals and that healthcare professionals would like more biomedical research publications to include a short, text-based plain language summary.

Don’t worry if you missed this poster at ISMPP Europe – we’ll be presenting encores at the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) 59th Spring Conference in Riga, Latvia, and at the 21st Annual Meeting of ISMPP in Washington, DC, USA in May.

The gathering of so many of our colleagues in London for ISMPP’s European Meeting allowed us to host a separate, in-person Member and Supporter workshop, during which we discussed core tenets of the Open Pharma vision for pharma-sponsored research. Make sure to subscribe to our email updates to hear more about the Open Pharma Vision later in 2025.  

In February, Joana Osório (Communications Team Leader at Oxford PharmaGenesis), Laura Dormer (Co-founder and Editorial Director at Becaris Publishing) and Sarah Thomas (Global Medical Publications and Communications Senior Manager at Ipsen) attended the Researcher to Reader Conference to facilitate a workshop titled More power to the reader: how can we improve research communication by making content more readable?

The workshop – proposed by Open Pharma – brought together stakeholders from across the scholarly communications ecosystem to explore biomedical research access and comprehension needs from a variety of user perspectives. After considering the needs of policymakers, researchers, patients and healthcare professionals, attendees identified the barriers and enablers to achieving a truly inclusive publishing ecosystem. Stay tuned for a full blog post about the workshop in the coming weeks.

To bring the first quarter of 2025 to a close on a high, we’re delighted to announce that Sage has joined Open Pharma as a Supporter. We’re excited to work more closely with Sage and to build on their valued contributions to Open Pharma projects and discussions in recent years.

We look forward to seeing some of you in Oxford, Riga or Washington next quarter as we attend the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers University Press Redux Conference, the EMWA Spring Conference and the ISMPP Annual Meeting. In the meantime, make sure you’re following us on LinkedIn and Bluesky to keep up to date with all of our activities.

Learn more about what we’ve been up to below or click here.

Timeline showing Open Pharma activities that took place between January and March 2025. The image reads: Our activities this quarter: Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association open access funders and enablers webinar participation; Open Pharma work shop in London, UK; healthcare professional (HCP) plain language summary (PLS) survey poster at the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) European Meeting; plain language summary of publication (PLSP) guidance roundtable at ISMPP Europe; blog post by Sophie Nobes and Sophie Adams about the global context of Open Pharma's commitments; HCP PLS survey geographical stratification abstract submitted to the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication; launch of Bluesky account; 'More power to the reader' workshop and lightning talk at the Researcher to Reader conference; Sage joins Open Pharma as a supporter; and, open access dashboard analysis manuscript submitted to PeerJ. Coming up next quarter: bronze sponsorship of Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers University Press Redux conference; topic meeting on real world evidence and transparency; Open Pharma hybrid meeting in Washington, DC; HCP PLS survey encore poster at the European Medical Writers Association Spring Conference; and, PLSP guidance roundtable and poster, HCP PLS survey encore poster and predatory publishing roundtable at the 2025 Annual Meeting of ISMPP.