Dear HIFA colleagues,
I am preparing a presentation for this coming Monday, to the Open Pharma group, hosted by Oxford Pharmagenesis (one of the lead sponsors for our Global Consultation last year, and also the sponsor of our HIFA Open Access project later this year.
https://www.hifa.org/news/press-release-global-health-advocates-call-wor...
https://www.hifa.org/news/open-pharma-launches-survey-understand-views-h...
Open Pharma's 'immediate priority is to secure authors publishing company-funded research the same right to publish open access as authors publishing research funded by other sources, so that all research can be made free to read from the date of publication'.
I am including a section on Access to reliable information on medicines, where I am planning to say:
"What would the global evidence ecosystem look like if all pharma-funded research were made available open-access tomorrow? There would be benefits but these might be smaller than we think. Few people read the full text of research papers. They include those working in pharma R&D and marketing; those who undertake systematic reviews; and a small percentage of health professionals and patients. Most prescribers and users of medicines will be guided by evidence that has been packaged for them [for example, patients may rely on the patient information leaflets that come with their medicines, while prescribers may use a guide to prescribing such as the British National Formulary."
I am anticipating being challenged on this issue and would be glad of your inputs. For example, I might be asked "What evidence do you have that few people read the full text of research papers?". I might then comment that in my own experience as a resident hospital doctor, I do not recall ever reading the full text of a research paper to guide my decision-making (in fact I'm not sure if I ever read a paper line by line, beginning to end, for any purpose!), whereas the BNF was a permanent fixture in my white coat pocket, consulting it several times a day. If I were practising today, I would be very wary of basing any decision on a single paper - for me this is inherently dangerous as compared with basing decisions on a systematic review or, more practically, on trusted guidance such as the BNF or WHO guidelines (which in turn are based on systematic review).
I tried to google for evidence about 'Few people read the full text of research papers' without much success. According to a 2007 paper in Physics World “as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” Ironically, the paper is behind a paywall so I don't know what if any evidence the author has to back this up. Can anyone help? Here is the link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-7058/20/1/33/pdf
Having a direct measure of how many people read an original research paper (and who they are) is clearly impossible. However there are at least two proxy indicators, and I would welcome your thoughts on these. The first is the citation count: how many times the paper has been cited in future publications. For example, the citation count of our 2004 'foundation' paper in The Lancet - Can we achieve health information for all by 2015? - is 346. This indicates that the paper has been cited 346 times in other papers since 2004. Another proxy indicator is the number of downloads: how many times people have downloaded the full text from the internet. I have tried to find the number of downloads of the above paper - without success. Again, please can anyone help? Is it possible to find out the number of times a paper has been downloaded?
Looking forward to your inputs - before Monday 7 July please!
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org