Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ERC-EuropePMC-2015 (Support to the Europe PMC initiative – Co-funding grant for the 2016-2021 period)

Teaser

This project seeks to provide continued support to the European Research Council (ERC) in the implementation of its Open Access strategy for projects funded in the life sciences domain. The ERC is a strong supporter of open access. The ERC believes that providing free online...

Summary

This project seeks to provide continued support to the European Research Council (ERC) in the implementation of its Open Access strategy for projects funded in the life sciences domain.

The ERC is a strong supporter of open access. The ERC believes that providing free online access to the articles and monographs describing the results of the research they have funded is the most effective way of ensuring that these results are read and used as the basis for further research (ERC Open Access Guidelines - revised February 2016).

Europe PMC (www.europepmc.org) provides a European infrastructure solution to the literature discovery problem within the domain of the life sciences. Our mission is to provide open, full text scientific literature resources and support innovation by engaging users, enabling contributors and integrating related research data. We are a partner of PubMed Central International and the designated repository for the life sciences portfolios of our 29 funders which includes the ERC through this action. We provide free access to 35.7 million articles abstracts, over 5.4 million full text articles and over 5 million other records including biological patents, preprints and clinical guidelines.

This current project supports the ongoing operational, maintenance and development costs of Europe PMC. In addition to the funding from the ERC through this project, funding is provided from another 28 European and International funders of life sciences research. The project enables Europe PMC to continue supporting the ERC’s Open Access Strategy by providing an easily accessible repository service for their funded research in the life sciences and by further increasing the visibility of the ERC as a funder of cutting-edge research by providing a clearly visible link between the publications and their associated ERC grants.

Over the 5 years of the project, Europe PMC will expand and provide global access to our world-class collection of open access full text research literature. The further development work funded by this project will support us in our goal of generating a deeply integrated information environment providing unique services to the research community. During the project we will provide ERC funded researchers with the ability to use Europe PMC as a repository for their manuscripts enabling them to comply with the ERC\'s Open Access policy. The project also enables Europe PMC to strengthen its position as an essential asset within the European open science infrastructure ecosystem.

Work performed

Work performed during the first reporting period (M1 – M18):

As per the project plan, a grant was awarded by the Wellcome Trust, co-funded by this ERC project, with contributions from the Wellcome Trust and the other Europe PMC funders to EMBL-EBI to support the further development and maintenance of Europe PMC for the period 1 April 2016- 31 March 2021. In the first 18 months of this project, Europe PMC has successfully delivered a number of milestones within this grant. This includes core technical developments such as the seamless migration of the Europe PMC plus manuscript submission service and the development of a new grant finder tool. Dedicated Author Profiles with personalised publication and citation reports based on ORCID and open citation data have also been released.

The development roadmap of Europe PMC is public and can viewed at: http://europepmc.org/Roadmap

In July 2017, Europe PMC was named as an ELIXIR Core Data Resource, in recognition of its importance to the wider life sciences community and its role in the long-term preservation of biological data.

Work performed during the second reporting period (M19-M36):

In the second 18 months of this project, Europe PMC has successfully delivered additional core technical developments. This includes enhancing full text searching, automating the ingestion of all grant data, adding preprints to the database, enhancing the text mining of funder acknowledgments for grant information, and developing a new manuscript submission system.

In October of 2018 the display of sentence snippets from full text to facilitate more accurate searches in articles was implemented. In this same month the team was able to load, index and display preprint metadata from the CrossRef API and link these to ORCIDs.

Additionally, in November 2018--stemming from a project the ERC had previously funded--text mining the acknowledgements sections full-text articles was rolled out to the other funders of Europe PMC. In this process, the methods used were refined and enhanced, and this resulted in a significant number of additional full-text articles linked to ERC grants.

In March 2019 a new manuscript submission system was in beta and scheduled to be released in May 2019. This new system includes a manuscript dashboard for collecting, searching, and sorting manuscripts. It also includes a new submission wizard and review wizard to make it much easier to create a submission and then preview and evaluate the final product. Additionally, the new manuscript submission system includes FTP integration for bulk uploads of publisher manuscripts. The beta release has a better user interface, integration with GRIST (database containing details of grants awarded by the Europe PMC Funders), and automates more system tasks than the previous submission system.

Final results

Europe PMC is a unique initiative, with no other comparable projects in the life sciences or other domains that offer similar opportunities to the scientific community (ERC funded researchers in particular) and its participating funding agencies.

Changes in the policies of funding agencies across Europe, including Open Access mandates, have led to an increased awareness of the benefits of open access publishing. However, in the absence of an easily accessible central repository, the impact is limited. This project supports Europe PMC to continue to provide this central repository service while also contributing to increasing awareness of open access and therefore positively impacting on the practices of life sciences researchers in Europe, regarding their publication and depositing behaviour.

One of the expected impacts of this project is the generation of interest among other funders covering the life sciences domain to join the Europe PMC initiative to promote open access amongst the researchers they fund. During the life of this project we have so far added three new funders to the project, the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance (India), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (CH).

This project is specifically designed to facilitate the ERC’s open access strategy, thus an expected impact is an increase in the level of compliance with the ERC\'s Open Access Guidelines for researchers funded by the ERC in the life sciences. The ERC’s approach to Open Access has wide-reaching societal implications, and also significant potential socio-economic impact. Its smooth implementation, via Europe PMC, is an important factor in achieving its maximum impact.

Europe PMC also has a significant societal impact through providing easy access to a large corpus of life sciences literature. However, the project itself was not intended to have a far-reaching socio-economic impact in itself.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.europepmc.org.