Support to the Europe PMC Initiative

Europe PMC is an open science resource for the life sciences and adjacent areas run by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It provides users with a central site and a powerful search engine to traverse both abstracts and full text of journal articles and books from multiple publishers, as well as preprints from a range of preprint servers, in a centralised, open repository. Working in close partnership with PubMed Central (at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine), Europe PMC provides access to abstracts and other metadata for 43,5 million publications, 9,5 million of which are available in full text. Europe PMC was directly accessed by more than 32 million unique IP addresses in 2023.

Europe PMC has been supported by the ERC since 2013. Recommended by the ERC Scientific Council as repository of choice for publications in the life sciences, it fulfils the critical role of enabling ERC funded researchers to comply with the open access requirements in their grant agreement. Europe PMC has developed bespoke algorithms to text-mine the literature for funding acknowledgements, as well as amalgamating grant details from other sources. The Europe PMC grant finder web interface and API provide easy ways to identify grants and associated publications; the grants are also enriched with ROR identifiers for institutions. Content is linked to research data and text-mined keywords and is enriched with ORCID persistent digital identifiers for authors; all made available transparently on the Europe PMC website and via several rich and heavily used programmatic services. Published open data and software allow scientists to interrogate and reproduce reported scientific experiments and results and provide the much-needed transparency and assurance as to the quality of publications. The open literature offers a window to these research outputs, and through crosslinking Europe PMC enhances their discoverability. Europe PMC also provides mechanisms to enhance credit for these outputs through ORCID linking and collection of additional metadata to increase their discovery. Increasingly, comprehensive collections of publications can provide the basis for new AI methods (such as Large Language Models) to make sense of the millions of articles published every year. This technology could have a game-changing impact on how we both search the literature and use it in research-related processes. Given that a centralised bulk critical mass of open literature that is readily accessible to software is now available, and considering how fast the power of specialist language models is increasing, application to the literature of this transformative technology is overdue. The Europe PMC initiative is currently financed by a group of 35 funding bodies from across Europe, including the ERC. The amount of each funder's contribution is calculated based on the proportion of their annual research spend in the life sciences domain. Based on the unique expertise and experience that EMBL-EBI offers, the funding bodies represented in the Europe PMC initiative intend to continue to provide financial support to EMBL-EBI to fund this activity after April 2026, which is when the current funding expires. For this purpose, the ERC will provide a co-funding grant to EMBL-EBI to support the maintenance and operation of the Europe PMC repository and its further development as a key resource for researchers in the life sciences. This will entail: − providing a rich suite of services to help researchers discover relevant research and the data and software that underpin it;refining workflows to support monitoring and compliance tracking of the open science policies of ERC and other funders; − maintenance and development of the manuscript submission system such that researchers can share their accepted manuscripts, preprints and open access publications, including books, in line with Open Access-related funder requirements; − refining workflows to support the emerging publish, review, curate model, for example as adopted by the Open Research Europe platform; − provision of a helpdesk service to support users; − providing an easy-to-use website and state-of-the-art programmatic access to content and added-value metadata, persistent identifiers and cross linking provided by Europe PMC; driven by community standards to ensure that other services, such as OpenAIRE, can make full use of these outputs. Based on the ERC's research spend in 2022, the funding rate for the co-funding grant to support Europe PMC will be 11%, with a maximum amount of 1.000.000 EUR. The evaluation committee assessing this proposal76 will be fully composed of representatives of Union institutions or bodies. The maximum duration of this grant will be 60 months.