Article Text
Abstract
Objectives Academical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to allow the broadest possible use. We aimed to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals and record the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.
Methods We identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of ≥15.0 on 24 May 2017, then excluded from the analysis journals that only publish review articles. Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about each journal’s open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.
Results Thirty-five medical journals publishing original research from 13 publishers were included in the analysis. All 35 journals offered some form of open access allowing articles to be free-to-read, either immediately on publication or after a delay of up to 12 months. Of these journals, 21 (60%) provided immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (eg, to specific research funders). Of these 21, 20 only offered a CC BY licence to authors funded by non-commercial organisations and one offered this option to any funder who required it.
Conclusions Most leading medical journals do not offer to authors reporting commercially funded research an open access licence that allows unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the published material. The journals’ policies are therefore not aligned with open access declarations and guidelines. Commercial research funders lag behind academical funders in the development of mandatory open access policies, and it is time for them to work with publishers to advance the dissemination of the research they fund.
- article processing charges
- commercial
- CC BY
- Creative Commons
- funding
- open access
- pharmaceutical
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors Conceptualisation, project administration, TE (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0307-725X), TK (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6152-7365), LS (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6117-781X), AW (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9354-6402); methodology, resources, investigation, formal analysis, TE; writing – original draft, TE and LS; visualisation, TE; writing – review and editing, TE, TK, LS, AW, CW (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3267-3990); supervision, TK, LS.
Funding This research was funded by Oxford PharmaGenesis.
Competing interests Tim Ellison, Tim Koder and Christopher Winchester are employees of Oxford PharmaGenesis, Oxford, UK. At the time of the research and writing of this manuscript, Laura Schmidt and Amy Williams were employees of Oxford PharmaGenesis, Oxford, UK, and are currently employed by Comradis and dna Communications, respectively. Christopher Winchester is also a Director and a shareholder of Oxford PharmaGenesis Holdings Ltd.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
Patient consent for publication Not required.