Phew! Quarter two of 2025 has certainly kept us on our toes here at Open Pharma with the launch of two research projects in April alone! Participating Members and Supporters began data collection for Request open access – a collaboration with the Sustainable Medicines Partnership designed to explore whether explicit and timely open access (OA) and Creative Commons licence requests by pharma companies can help to optimize OA publishing practices. We also distributed a survey to gather healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) experiences and perspectives of OA publishing. This survey will remain open until Friday 18 July, so please do continue to share it with your networks.
We were equally delighted to sponsor the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) University Press Redux Conference. The conference, which took place in Oxford, UK, was an opportunity for academic publishers to discuss the changing landscape of publishing, including the opportunities and challenges created by artificial intelligence, evolving business models and sustainable development goals. You can read more about our experience at the conference in this blog post by Joanna Donnelly (Communications Consultant at Oxford PharmaGenesis).
April ended on a high, with Ardelyx becoming the latest Supporter of Open Pharma! The move emphasizes the company’s commitment to fostering community engagement and building a healthier future. Along with the existing Members and Supporters of Open Pharma, we will work together with Ardelyx to ensure that the highest-quality, peer-reviewed evidence is available and accessible to every person who needs it, wherever they are around the world.
May was the month of conferences, with the Open Pharma team taking to the road to attend both the 59th European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) Spring Conference and the 2025 Annual Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publications Professionals (ISMPP).
At the EMWA Spring Conference, we presented an encore of our HCP plain language summary survey poster and hosted a roundtable about the need for understandable research content. We were encouraged by the strong interest in how the pharmaceutical industry can help advance accessible and equitable scientific communication. We’re also grateful to all roundtable participants for their feedback on our ongoing plain language summary of publication (PLSP) guidance project.
We also discussed this PLSP guidance project at the Annual Meeting of ISMPP, with a roundtable session during which we gathered feedback from diverse stakeholders about the consensus principles outlined in a research poster. We will share updates about the PLSP guidance project in our future quarterly updates.
With our new vision for pharma research communications nearing completion, we also hosted a hybrid meeting to discuss how our Members and Supporters are implementing the principles of OA publishing, plain language summaries, use of author and institutional metadata, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data, and meaningful patient involvement. The insights shared during this meeting will help drive broader adoption of open science principles among our Member and Supporter organizations.
In June, we welcomed Kora Korzec (Director of Community at Crossref), Luis Montilla (Technical Community Manager at Crossref) and Rocio Gaudioso Pedraza (Community Engagement Manager at Crossref) to a topic meeting about the principles of open scholarly infrastructure, the importance of digital object identifiers and metadata.
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