This week, we are excited to announce that our open access dashboard has gone live! We also highlight our poster about the dashboard that we presented at the 19th Annual Meeting of ISMPP earlier this week. We read about potential social biases in authors’ willingness to share data, about community engagement in relation to data sharing, and about an editor exodus from two leading neuroscience journals. Finally, we highlight the upcoming ISPOR 2023 conference, as well as a virtual session on open science hosted by the UN.
To read:
Open Pharma’s open access dashboard goes live via Open Pharma | 4-minute read
Our position statement emphasizes the importance of publishing research open access to ensure that high-quality, peer-reviewed evidence is available to anyone who needs it, anywhere in the world, without charge. Timely open access publication of new research findings helps improve transparency, foster trust in research, accelerate advances in medical science and, we believe, ultimately improve patient care. Benchmarking the proportion of journal articles published open access (also called the open access rate) and observing how this changes over time can help us to understand the barriers to open access publishing in different medical research settings and to set targets for achieving open access equity. To understand the differences in open access publishing of medical articles by authors affiliated to pharma companies versus those affiliated to universities, we created this automated, live, online dashboard using the Lens platform. You can find our methodology behind the creation of the dashboard and other resources here.
Benchmarking open access in publications with authors affiliated to pharma companies and universities via Open Pharma | 5-minute read
Alongside the launch of our open access dashboard, we presented our current analyses from the dashboard at the 19th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) in Washington, DC, this week. Briefly, our current findings show that about two-thirds of articles with authors affiliated to pharma companies and universities are open access, but that open access rates vary between therapy areas.
Social bias in data sharing via Scientific Data | 30-minute read
This analysis of 1634 authors of papers in which data were indicated to be ‘available upon request’ found some interesting disparities between the rates of data sharing depending on the presumed ethnicity and gender of the data requestors. The study found systematically lower response rates to data sharing requests made by presumed Chinese authors or authors from Chinese institutions when compared to requests made by presumed Anglo-Saxon authors. Similarly, among data requestors with Chinese names, response rates to data sharing requests were lower for presumed male requestors than for presumed female requestors.
Data sharing in the community via Social Science & Medicine | 30-minute read
As data sharing becomes more widely incorporated into standard research and publication practices, this article asks, “to whom do benefits of data sharing accrue and to whom do benefits not accrue”? To answer this question, this article evaluates data sharing from a community-engaged research angle. The authors argue that unless effective community engagement and rich contextual knowledge are achieved, data sharing biases will persist. The article also provides several recommendations on how to achieve better community engagement related to data sharing.
Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? via Nature | 5-minute read
Editors from two leading neuroscience journals have resigned over what they believe to be excessively high article processing charges (APCs) set by publisher Elsevier. The journals NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports currently charge APCs of $3450 and $900, respectively, the latter of which will double to $1800 at the end of May. The more than 40 editors who quit over the issue are now planning to start their own journal with the non-profit publisher MIT press.
To engage with:
Register for ISPOR 2023 via ISPOR
This year, the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) are hosting their annual conference in Boston, MA, between 7 and 10 May 2023. Providing an opportunity to learn the latest trends in healthcare economics and outcomes research, the conference will have plenary sessions, courses, networking opportunities, posters, symposia and much more! The programme is now available, and you can register for the conference here.
The Science, Technology & Innovation Forum side event 2023 via United Nations
As part of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, the United Nations (UN) created 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve by 2030, which were adopted by all UN member states in 2015. Open science is a major factor in achieving many of these SDGs, and the UN hosts conferences focused solely on the importance of open science. To this end, the UN will host a virtual panel discussion addressing the mechanisms and infrastructures for developing equitable scholarly publishing ecosystems that can be used to achieve some of the SDGs and beyond. This virtual panel discussion will take place on 2 May 2023 as a side event to the 8th Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology & Innovation for the SDGs. You can register here.
Have you completed our data sharing needs assessment survey? Have your say here!
