The Open Pharma alliance of pharmaceutical and biotech businesses announced today the urgent need for simple language summaries in peer-reviewed medical journal publications. Open Pharma recommendations, which were published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Medical Research & Opinion, aim to make the medical publication model “more open” and a “more accessible and inclusive environment.”
According to the authors, this would make medical research more accessible to all target audiences, including patients, patient advocates, carers, healthcare professionals, and politicians. The authors said, “Scientific communities are now focused on driving the next step towards openness: accessibility. The broad range of stakeholders involved in medical research now puts the pharmaceutical industry in a unique position to make the medical publishing model more open.”
Open Pharma, which was founded in 2016, brings together a coalition of pharmaceutical and biotech businesses and other research funders, healthcare experts, regulators, patients, publishers, and other healthcare stakeholders. Their goal is to make medical research truly open access (free to read for anyone online), which they believe will increase transparency, progress medical science, and, eventually, improve patient care.Today’s demand for plain language summaries takes the next step toward transparency. Significantly, while simple language summaries are still in their infancy, it establishes what the recommendations refer to as a minimum baseline for future medical publication lay plain summaries to follow.
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