Supporting open science through increased preprint publications
Contributing to rising research output in low and middle income countries Since 2002, BMJ Group has contributed to improving global health by participating in the WHO’s Research4Life Organization’s Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) . This programme grants free access to nearly 20,000 journals and e-books to health workers and researchers in more than 100 developing countries. A recent study 5 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reveals that the Research4Life initiative has directly contributed to a significant increase in scientific output. In low and middle income countries, research production in health sciences has increased by up to 75%, and clinical trial activity has risen by up to 35%.
We want to continue reshaping the way medical research is conducted and disseminated, and our co-founding of medRxiv in 2019 with Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory and Yale University is helping us to do that. The best decisions rely on the best evidence. Therefore, we make it our responsibility to help authors and researchers reach and share the most robust evidence available. Collaboration and preprints are crucial in achieving this goal. Throughout 2023, medRxiv contributed significantly to open science by publishing 12,200 preprints, representing a 30% increase from the previous year. Our preprint server allows authors in the clinical field to share their findings quickly with the scientific community, fostering faster collaboration and advancement. Our partnership with medRxiv also enables us to directly transfer manuscripts from medRxiv to all journals within our 60+ collection.
Enabling faster access to evidence
Over 585K open access articles published, with 12.4M citations 6
5.9M mentions of open access articles across social media, international news, policy documents and academic sources 7
Content published open access in our journals received nearly 33M article views by 16M users in more than 190 countries 8
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