Pharmaceutical companies should publish more research open access - The BMJ

"Pharmaceutical companies fund around half of all biomedical research, but, in contrast to many public funders of research, only two companies (Takeda and Ipsen) mandate that all the research they fund must be published open access. Nevertheless, other pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, are able to publish up to three quarters of the research they fund open access without a mandate. This is not bad when less than 50% of research overall is published open access....

Open Pharma has produced a position statement on open access that calls for journals to give authors who are publishing research funded by pharmaceutical companies the same rights as authors of research funded by public funders. In the 9 months since its launch, the position statement has gained over 150 endorsements, including eight publisher and 29 pharmaceutical company endorsements.

The liveliest part of the roundtable meeting was when patients called for full open access to research. Patients have not usually been included in debates about open access because they have not been considered to be “end users” of research. Nowadays, not only do patients participate at each stage of the research life cycle, from clinical trial design to establishing patient-reported outcome measurements, but they are also increasingly involved in the creation and curation of scientific studies. Yet patients can access no more than one-quarter of published clinical research. ..."