Support to the Europe PMC initiative (2021-2026)

Project Information

ERC-EuropePMC-2020

Grant agreement ID: 101034194

DOI

10.3030/101034194

Project closed

EC signature date 14 December 2020

Start date 1 April 2021

End date 31 March 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 7 252 184,00

EU contribution

€ 1 000 000,00

Coordinated by

THE WELLCOME TRUST LIMITED
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ERC-EuropePMC-2020 (Support to the Europe PMC initiative (2021-2026))

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project addresses the open access needs of ERC-funded researchers within the life sciences, particularly those required to meet the revised open access requirements in the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement.

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.

Europe PMC (www.europepmc.org) provides an infrastructure solution to the literature discovery problem within the domain of the life sciences. Its mission is to provide open, full text scientific literature resources and support innovation by engaging users, enabling contributors, and integrating related research data. It is a partner of PubMed Central International and the designated repository for the life sciences portfolios of its funders which includes the ERC through this action. It provides free access to preprints, article abstracts, and full text articles. A key feature of Europe PMC is the extensive and deep linking with underlying research data, which is becoming increasingly important as open science policies and practice develop.

Building on its predecessor “Support to the Europe PMC initiative –Co-funding grant for the 2016-2021 period” (ERC-EuropePMC-2015), this project aims to fulfil the following objectives:
• Support the continued delivery and development of Europe PMC to ensure it remains a key resource for life science researchers to discover relevant research and the data underpinning it.

• Develop Europe PMC and its manuscript submission service to support researchers to comply with their funders’ open access requirements. This will include extending existing workflows to enhance metadata quality within Europe PMC.

• Continue providing support and services that enable funders to monitor and check compliance with their open access requirements. This work will be delivered by extending the existing funder dashboards and by ensuring compliance with OpenAIRE’s “Guidelines for Literature Repositories” to ensure programmatic access.

• Refine existing workflows that enable the direct ingest of content from relevant high-quality open access publishing platforms (such as Open Research Europe) into Europe PMC and support the linkage of external data sources.

This project focuses on meeting the open access needs of awards made within Horizon 2020 and the Horizon Europe programme. However, researchers funded through previous ERC funding cycles continue to be able to use Europe PMC as a route to open access. More widely, completion of these objectives will enable Europe PMC to achieve its mission of providing an innovative and trusted platform that actively progresses Open Science, making Europe PMC a resource that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Overall usage of Europe PMC improved during this reporting period, with an average of 4 million unique IP addresses accessing the site monthly. Additionally, Europe PMC services have been fast and reliable, as Europe PMC website and Europe PMC homepage uptime targets were continuously met throughout the reporting period. More specific milestones related to each of the objectives have been reached:

• Continuous improvement of services: During this reporting period, applications and databases were migrated to a more resilient location. Additionally, coverage of UK PhD theses was extended via EThOs, and over 176000 biomedical theses now accessible via Europe PMC. As of September 2025, Europe PMC content now stands at 46.9 million article abstracts, over 11.1 million full text articles and 1 million preprints.

• Existing workflows have been extended to improve metadata quality within Europe PMC. This work included integration of preprints into the citation network and exploration of additional external metadata sources such as DataCite and OpenAlex to strengthen linking of research outputs.

• Europe PMC continues to provide support and services that enable funders to check compliance with their open access requirements. In June 2024, the investigation into the addition of ROR IDs to the affiliation metadata of accepted manuscripts was completed and implementation has begun. Additionally, during this reporting period, discovery work began for indexing further metadata from XML files provided by publishers, such as ROR iDs and CReDiT taxonomy.

• Existing workflows have been successfully refined to directly ingest content from Open Research Europe and over 700 articles have been ingested to date. Moreover, Europe PMC has further supported the linkage of external data sources through the completion of various activities. The service indexed preprints from MetaArXiv and VeriXic, bringing the total indexed preprint servers to 35.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Continuous improvement of services and achievement of performance targets have contributed to a strong usage of the site, especially by ERC funded researchers. ERC grant holders are some of the most active users, when compared to all other funders of the project. This not only shows the relevance and importance of this infrastructure to the wider research community, but also points to Europe PMC being a valued tool for ERC funded researchers to comply with ERC’s open access strategy.

Moreover, this project is working towards leading and supporting the development of open publication workflows. By the end of the project, it is expected preprints will be made more discoverable and more integrated into Europe PMC. This development has several potential impacts. Firstly, it enables Europe PMC to support existing policies on preprints and rapid publications that both the ERC and other current or future funders have in place. Additionally, it strengthens the view of preprints being perceived as a first class-research object, thereby encouraging researchers to publish preprints. Ultimately, the wider publication and discoverability of preprints may have wider societal and socio-economic implications, streamlining the research pipeline and producing more accurate, applicable results.

Integration of open access literature with information found in major research outputs such as data, software, authors, grants, and institutions will yield several expected results. For example, introduction of institutional identifiers (RORs) into grant data can lead to the integration of institutional persistent identifiers into publications in the future. Europe PMC has developed a workstream, focusing on text-mining RORIDs from article XML and therefore adding RORIDs as structured article metadata. This is expected to benefit ERC grant holders who currently hold an ERC Horizon Europe grant and are recommended to include institutional persistent identifiers as part of their article metadata requirements.

This project was 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 significant potential socio-economic impact. Its smooth implementation, via Europe PMC, is an important factor in achieving its maximum impact.

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