The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are aimed at promoting the sustainable development of the world. The objective of this study is not only to provide a comprehensive comparison of collaborative efforts across research collaboration types within North America and Europe but also to explore the effectiveness of transatlantic SDG collaborative efforts when there are public-private and interdisciplinary alliances. We analyzed more than 6.5 million publications, of which more than one million were transatlantic collaborations. In total, 6,533,278 publications were included in the initial publication dataset with at least one U.S. author. Within the 1,076,470 SDG related publications, 326,416 were co-authored with additional regions. Within the top 2 quartiles, 25.45% were classified as SDG related research according to the Dimensions SDG data classification scheme. Publications marked as transatlantic collaboration steeply increased the proportional differences in closed vs open access status and policy citations when compared to U.S. internal collaborations (1.36%), for example, U.S.-Netherlands (2.01%), U.S.-Belgium (2.00%) and U.S.-Switzerland (1.98%). Transatlantic collaborative research fosters not only openness, but is also more likely to be cited in both policy and patent documents.