Benchmarking open access publication rates for the pharmaceutical industry and research-intensive academic institutions
Authors: Rees Tomas , Philippon Valérie , Liew Andrew , Baróniková Slávka , Gattrell William T , Gordon Jo , Koskenkorva Taija S , Mysore Santosh , Osório Joana , Koder Tim J 
Published: September 2024

Objective

In biomedical and health sciences, many articles are published open access (OA). Rates of OA publications continue to grow, including for research carried out by pharmaceutical companies. To help drive more openness in the pharmaceutical industry, we aimed to compare the OA publication rates of pharmaceutical companies with those of academic institutions.

Methods

We assessed OA publication rates from the 40 largest pharmaceutical companies by earnings and 40 comparator academic institutions that publish the largest number of medical research articles in their geographical region. Using the Lens, we built a live public dashboard that presents the OA publication rates for articles with authors affiliated to the pharmaceutical companies and comparator academic institutions of interest, detailed by OA model and licence, and by medical therapy area. We performed further analysis on data downloaded from the dashboard.

Results

In our primary analysis of articles 12–24 months since publication date, 76.6% of pharmaceutical company (pharma) and 69.5% of academic institution (academia) publications were OA. The most common OA models were gold (pharma, 37%; academia, 41%) and hybrid (pharma, 22%; academia, 11%). Oncology had lower rates of OA publications than other therapy areas. Growth in the OA publication rate was generally more rapid for pharmaceutical companies than for academic institutions, regardless of field.

Conclusions

The OA publication rate was higher for pharmaceutical companies than for academic institutions and continues to increase. With the pharmaceutical industry focused on encouraging authors to publish OA and increasingly aware of the different types of OA licences, we expect and welcome further changes. Our new report provides data on pharmaceutical company and academic institution publications that are updated every 2 weeks. We encourage others to use this open resource and report their results.

Key messages

What is already known on this topic

Open access (OA) publication rates for pharmaceutical companies have been steadily growing. However, previous methods for analysing pharmaceutical company OA publication rates have not been conducive to automation and have not facilitated easy comparison between pharmaceutical companies and other research-intensive environments, such as academic institutions.

What this study adds

We built an online dashboard that presents continually and automatically updated OA publication rates for articles with authors affiliated to several large pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. We found that the OA publication rate was higher for pharmaceutical companies than for academic institutions and that growth in OA publications was generally more rapid for pharmaceutical companies than for academic institutions.

How this study might affect research, practice or policy

Our dashboard allows ongoing monitoring, and we encourage the use of this free tool to capture evolving OA publishing behaviours and the disclosure of these results to help drive greater adoption of OA publishing practices.

Strengths and limitations of this study

As expected with large-scale bibliometrics sampling, there are various points at which error and/or information loss may have entered this analysis, for example, during the parsing of author affiliations or categorisation of topics and article types.

The comparator set (a globally representative group of research-intensive academic institutions) may not represent academic institutions in general because it includes only the largest academic institutions (in terms of publication counts) from each global region.

There is overlap between the pharmaceutical company and academic institution analysis sets because first, pharmaceutical company publications often include academic authors, and second, academic institution publications may include pharmaceutical company authors. Hence, some individual publications may have been included in both analysis sets.

The analysis does not account for studies that are led by authors at academic institutions but funded by pharmaceutical companies. These investigator-sponsored studies typically do not have pharmaceutical company authors, and pharmaceutical companies have no influence over decisions relating to publications resulting from these studies, including target journal, OA status and license type.

Plain Language Summary

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies develop and deliver most of the world’s new medicines. To ensure important information about these medicines is shared transparently with audiences across the world, more and more often, pharmaceutical companies are choosing to publish their research open access. Open access publishing allows anyone to read and, in some cases, reuse the contents of research publications for free. In medical journals, an increasing proportion of articles are published open access every year. However, at the moment, we don’t understand how the open access publication rates of medical publications from pharmaceutical companies compare with those of medical publications from academic institutions. Understanding this could help the scientific community assess how open access publication practices are changing over time.

We made an online platform that provides a free, live report of the open access publication rates for pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. We found that 77% of pharmaceutical company research publications and 70% of academic institution research publications were published open access. Open access publication rates increased each year for both pharmaceutical company and academic institution research publications, but the rates were increasing faster for pharmaceutical companies.

Our results are similar to those from other studies of open access publication rates. We encourage users to explore our free online live report and share their results publicly. The live report can be accessed using the following link:https://www.lens.org/lens/report/view/Open-access-dashboard/14572/page/14573.