Production and uptake of Open Access publications involving the private sector: the case of big pharma

Abstract

Over the last years Open Access has been ranked very high on science policy agenda’s both internationally as well as nationally. This resulted in many national mandates and international guidelines on OA publishing of scientific results. Despite the several studies on OA, the way in which private companies have embraced the OA movement remains relatively understudied. Our research aims at providing evidence on the interplay between private companies and OA publishing, by focusing on Big pharma. We look both at the extent to which Big pharma publishes OA papers as well as the extent to which Big pharma relies on previous OA studies to built their own research. Our findings show that Big pharma is increasingly engaged with the OA movement.