Open access policies of high impact medical journals: a cross-sectional study

Abstract

ObjectivesAcademic 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 set out to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals for research in general and industry-funded research in particular, and record the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.\n\nMethodsWe identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of at least 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 journals 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.\n\nResultsThirty-five medical journals publishing original research from 13 publishers were included in the analysis. All 35 journals offered some form of open access with varying embargo periods of up to 12 months. Of these journals, 21 (60%) provided immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (e.g. to specific research funders). Of these 21, 20 only offered a CC BY licence to authors funded by non-commercial organizations and one offered this option to funders who required it.\n\nConclusionsMost 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 academic 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.\n\nStrengths and limitations of this studyO_LIThis manuscript includes a systematic analysis of open access policies of journals with a high impact factor, including society-owned journals, from multiple publishers.\nC_LIO_LIThe open access policies of all journals analysed were clarified, and confirmation of our findings was received by email from 97% of the contacted journals.\nC_LIO_LIOpen access policies of the journals and publishers analysed are subject to change, so the information presented here may not be current.\nC_LIO_LIBy selecting journals with a high impact factor, our analysis does not include prestigious journals from specialized therapy areas and regional or non-English language journals, which may have lower impact factors.\nC_LIO_LIAlthough our study covers only a small number of journals, extending such a manual analysis to a greater number of journals without loss of detail and verification of all results would be cumbersome and inefficient by relying on traditional analysis tools.\nC_LI