We saw out 2024 with a bang here at Open Pharma, with a quarter packed full of presentations, publications and preparations for 2025!
We began October with the publication of an article about publisher perspectives of plain language summaries (PLS) in Medical Writing. The article presents the results of our 2023 survey of journal publishers and demonstrates a need for change in journal practices to support the publication of PLS.
We were also delighted to be joined by Avishek Pal (Global Medical Director, Cell & Gene Therapy at Novartis) for a topic meeting about the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) Medical Communications Focus Area Working Group.
October concluded with celebrations for International Open Access Week. We shared our open access dashboard analysis manuscript as a preprint on bioRxiv. This manuscript presents the methods we used to develop the live dashboard, and it benchmarks open access publication rates for pharma and academia. To add an Open Access Week flair, we used artificial intelligence to generate a catchy sing-along summary of the abstract.
We were also delighted to host a special open access International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) University webinar about Creative Commons licences, which elaborated on our April article in The MAP Newsletter.
In November, we were honoured to welcome Trishna Bharadia (Founder of The Spark Global), Catherine Skobe (Senior Director, Publications Management Team Lead at Pfizer), Louise Roch (Senior Scientific Communications Manager, Retinal Health at Boehringer Ingelheim), Sarah Griffiths (Communications Director at Oxford PharmaGenesis), Hayley Chapman (Senior Program Director, Patient Focused Medicines Development at The Synergist) and Sophia Walker (Patient Editor at BMJ) for a feature-length topic meeting about patient involvement in publications.
For our final guest blog post of the year, Erick Turner (Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University) and Chris Chambers (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Cardiff University and Co-founder of Registered Reports) explored how Registered Reports and regulatory review process could be leveraged to increase trust in pharma-funded research.
Finally, we were delighted to announce that Lilly became the latest Member of Open Pharma in December.
Following a short break over the holiday period, we’re now looking forward to the first of our 2025 events. Open Pharma will be attending the European Meeting of ISMPP in London, UK from 27 to 29 January, where we will host a roundtable about plain language summaries of publications and will present the results of our latest survey of healthcare professionals. We look forward to seeing you there!
Learn more about what we’ve been up to below or click here.
