Featuring an industry-first open access announcement from Shire, highlights from the 2018 European Meeting of ISMPP and the ‘hypocrisy’ of medical journals.
Shire becomes the first pharmaceutical company to introduce an open access policy via Shire
Shire announced this week that, as of 2 January 2018, all Shire-supported research manuscripts must be submitted to journals that allow end users open access to the published materials. This new policy was announced at the 2018 European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP). Shire is the first biotechnology company to introduce such a policy, which represents a major milestone both for Shire and for the Open Pharma project.
Richard Smith: the hypocrisy of medical journals over transparency via BMJ Opinion
This blog, written by the Chair of Open Pharma, reflects on the apparent hypocrisy of medical journals, which, for all of their rhetoric on increasing transparency, generally do not allow research funded by pharmaceutical companies to be published open access with a CC BY licence (the least restrictive open access option). The piece suggests that the reasons given by publishers for this disparity do not stand up to scrutiny and that the real reason may in fact be financial. The conclusion is a call for more pharmaceutical companies to mandate CC BY licences for their publications, as not-for-profit funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council have done.
Open Pharma at the 2018 European Meeting of ISMPP via Open Pharma
In a panel session at this year’s European Meeting of ISMPP, members of the Open Pharma project discussed some of the key themes of the initiative: open access, preprints and post-publication peer review. This was just one of the many discussions and sessions at the meeting that were highly relevant to the goals of Open Pharma. Find out more in this overview of the meeting’s open science highlights.
Published articles with preprints get more engagement and more citations via MedicalResearch.com
This interview with Stelios Serghiou and John PA Ioannidis explores their recent study on what happens to biomedical research submitted to the bioRxiv preprint server and how having a preprint affects the reception of the final publication. They found that both numbers of citations and Altmetric scores tended to be greater if an article had been preprinted.
ROARMAP: the open access policy registry via ROARMAP
This repository of open access policies, categorized by type of organization, charts the growth of the various mandates that have been put in place by research funders, academic institutions and other bodies.
