Pharmaceutical and biotech companies who form the Open Pharma collaboration, have announced the ever-pressing need for plain language summaries in peer-reviewed medical journal publications.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Medical Research & Opinion, Open Pharma’s recommendations come as an aim to make the medical publishing model ‘more open’ and a ‘more accessible and inclusive environment.’
This, the authors’ state, would make engagement with medical research easier for all intended audiences from patients, patient advocates and caregivers, to healthcare professionals and policymakers.
Launched in 2016, Open Pharma brings together a group of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and other research funders, alongside healthcare professionals, regulators, patients, publishers and other stakeholders in healthcare. Their drive is to take medical research from behind paywalls to becoming fully open access which they state will ‘improve transparency, advance medical science and, ultimately improve patient care.’
This call for plain language summaries begins “the next step of openness”, and crucially while plain language summaries are ‘still in their infancy’, sets out what the recommendations call a ‘minimum standard’ for future medical publication lay plain summaries to abide to.
The minimum standard recommends for all summaries to be in the style of an abstract, understandable and readable (in text only, rather than in videos or infographics), free of technical jargon, unbiased, non-promotional, and easily accessed.
The authors state that standard minimum approaches for developing and sharing index-friendly plain language summaries are needed to help ensure that these multi-stakeholder communication channels are compliant with pharmaceutical industry standards. This would also help frame plain language summaries as valid and effective forms of sharing research.
Click here to read the original press release.
