Welcome to the latest edition of the Open Pharma monthly update! Each month, our team curates the most important news, milestones and insights from the Open Pharma community and beyond, delivering them straight to your inbox.
In this issue, we’re excited to highlight the Open Pharma research presented at the 2026 ISMPP Annual Meeting and the first section of a two-part PFMD report on patient commitments and metrics.
Open Pharma updates
Open Pharma at ISMPP Annual 2026
- Open Pharma had a strong presence at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) held in Washington, DC, USA between 20 and 22 April, hosting two roundtable discussions on open access in pharma research communications and our vision for the future of pharma-sponsored research publishing. The team also presented posters on recent Open Pharma research relevant to those involved in publication planning and medical communications. Find out more by accessing the posters online through the links below.
- Characterizing the open access and Creative Commons licence landscape for pharma-funded and non-commercial research
- Healthcare professionals’ perspectives and experiences of open access publishing: an Open Pharma survey
- Request OA: journal responses to pre-publication requests for open access to company-sponsored biomedical research
- The impact of requiring permissions and paying a fee for reusing published content on research dissemination
- Transparency of content reuse permissions and costs in biomedical research journals
PLSP guidance manuscript submitted to CMRO
- Since 2024, Open Pharma has collaborated with representatives from Becaris Publishing, Sage and Taylor & Francis Group to review existing standards and practices for plain language summaries of publications (PLSPs). Together, we have agreed a set of key principles to standardize the publication of PLSPs across publishers and indexing services. Following stakeholder review at the 2025 ISMPP Europe and Annual meetings, we have now developed a commentary article describing our work, which has been submitted to Current Medical Research and Opinion (CMRO).
Invitation to collaborate with the ISMPP Insider newsletter
- Open Pharma has been invited to collaborate with the ISMPP Insider newsletter (formerly The MAP Newsletter) to investigate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) tools – such as Doximity and OpenEvidence – on engagement with scientific content. The article will explore how medical communications practices may need to adapt to support accurate processing and dissemination of research by AI tools.
Insight of the month
Transforming patient commitments into demonstrable impact – part 1/2 via Patient Engagement Synapse | 2-minute read
- A two-part investigation by Patient Focused Medicines Development (PFMD) assessed public commitments from 24 pharma and biotech companies to determine how patient commitments are currently articulated and whether they are linked to defined metrics. While commitment statements were consistently published, the depth of commitments to patient engagement were varied, and defined, measurable indicators demonstrating impact were lacking. This research contributes to ongoing discussions on how patient involvement should be embedded consistently and meaningfully across all stages of research activities and publications. This will be explored further in an upcoming Open Pharma position statement on patient involvement.
Recommended reads
Royal Society Publishing achieves the ambitious goal of becoming 100% open access by 2026 via The Royal Society | 2-minute read
From open access to preprints: are we repeating the same mistakes in scholarly publishing? via The Scholarly Kitchen | 10-minute read
Is it worth publishing open access? – the scientific impact of open access publications in the field of medical education via Medical Education Online | 20-minute read
Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more via Cancer Research UK | 5-minute read
A new environment for license negotiations: 40% of recent articles in the top publishers’ subscription/hybrid journals are freely available online via The Journal of Academic Librarianship | 15-minute read
Upcoming dates and deadlines
These meetings are for Open Pharma Members and Supporters only. Please contact us for more information about how to join Open Pharma.
- Patient involvement working groups | ISMPP Annual digest – 10:30 EDT / 15:30 BST / 16:30 CEST on 7 May
- PLS and discoverability working group | ISMPP Annual digest – 10:00 EDT / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST on 11 May
- OA working group | Reviewing the open access objection handler – 09:00 EDT / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST on 15 May
- Topic meeting | Novel plain language formats – 10:00 EDT / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST on 19 May
- Members’ meeting – 09:00 EDT / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST on 29 May
- AI discussion forum | ISMPP Annual digest – 09:30 EDT / 14:30 BST / 15:30 CEST on 23 June
We hope you enjoyed, and found inspiration in, this month’s highlights. As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions – if you have an idea for a future monthly update, let us know! To keep up to date with what we’re doing between updates, make sure to follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
