Free e-resource for science researchers
The Scientific Council of the ERC has adopted an open-access policy. All peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects are deposited in Internet-accessible libraries after a certain period of time. ERC believes that providing free online access to science literature will ensure that promising research outcomes will be further researched. A recent FP7 project is helping the ERC implement its open-access strategy for projects regarding the life sciences. The ERC-EUROPEPMC-SUP-2013 project suggested that the ERC join the Europe PubMed Central (PMC) Funders' Group and contribute to the costs of running Europe PMC. Europe PMC is an expansion of UKPMC, which was first launched in January 2007 with sponsorship and funding from biomedical research bodies in the United Kingdom. ERC-funded researchers can now submit their articles via a dedicated deposition service called Europe PMC plus. To increase the visibility of the ERC as a funder of cutting-edge research, researchers are providing a link to ERC grants. In 2013, over 650 ERC-funded researchers requested a Europe PMC plus account and over 300 author manuscripts were published in Europe PMC and mirrored to PubMed Central and PMC Canada. Furthermore, the researchers linked nearly 650 papers to their grants. One of the enhancements made to Europe PMC during 2013, though not funded by the ERC grant, was the integration of Europe PMC's website, search systems and web services with ORCID, a website enabling researchers to create and update unique, persistent professional identifiers. Europe PMC also includes text mining-based marked-up text that links to external datasets such as the Protein Data Bank. Another achievement was the development of the Restful web service that provides programmatic access to all of the publications and related information in Europe PMC. Through a competition, Europe PMC sought to increase public awareness of the literature resources it contains, particularly targeting researchers in the early stage of their careers. This also raised awareness of the open-access policies of the Europe PMC funders. This unique initiative offers an easily accessible, user-friendly central repository to aid researchers in the search for relevant articles in the life sciences field.
Keywords
Open-access policy, European Research Council, text mining, research results, science literature
