The year 2020 was marked by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Europe PMC team, like many others around the world, started to work from home.

More than 4,500 Research Square preprints discoverable alongside peer-reviewed research Research Square’s collection of more than 4,500 full-text COVID-19 preprints have been indexed in Europe PMC, an open-access repository of more than 1 million biomedical research works.

We are excited to announce the recent release of metagenomics annotations for Europe PMC publications.

This month, Europe PMC released a new version of SciLite, a powerful tool for highlighting annotations in life sciences publications. SciLite is powered by the Europe PMC annotation platform via the open annotation API, which provides access to over 1.3 billion annotations.

As a response to the current pandemic crisis, organisations worldwide have increasingly made funding available for COVID-19 research.

In this pandemic, researchers have responded by publishing results rapidly, often through preprints. In fact, up to half of the publications in Europe PMC on COVID-19 are preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.

In September 2019 we welcomed the first open, global grant IDs to Europe PMC. Wellcome became the first funder to register DOIs for their grant awards with Crossref. Grant metadata is provided by Europe PMC, and in a pilot integration, the grant IDs were featured in a PLOS ONE publication.

We’re delighted to announce that MQ: Transforming Mental Health and Pancreatic Cancer UK join Europe PMC as a new funder. This brings the Europe PMC funder family to 31 members. MQ: Transforming Mental Health is an international mental health research charity that funds multidisciplinary research into mental health across biological, psychological and social sciences.

Europe PMC is a searchable database that allows access to life sciences publications worldwide including preprints and micropublications. Europe PMC offers cutting-edge tools to improve the discovery of articles around a topic of interest and provides links to the data behind the articles.

Europe PMC has been indexing preprints since 2018, hosting content initially from bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, PeerJ Preprints, F1000, and subsequently adding content from medRxiv and Beilstein Archives. Europe PMC now indexes over 100K preprints.

What research outputs did you fund? Research funders need to track the outcomes of research that they have funded. To facilitate this Europe PMC has recently developed the Funders’ Dashboard, a new feature available for Europe PMC funders, which displays the profile and impact of the research publications in Europe PMC that they have funded.