In July 2020, Europe PMC began indexing the full text of COVID-19 preprints. The initiative supported by Wellcome, the UK Medical Research Council, and Swiss National Science Foundation, has now made over 15,300 full text COVID-19 preprints searchable and free to read, alongside peer reviewed articles. Number of full text COVID-19 preprints in Europe PMC by month.

Europe PMC infrastructure grant renewal   We start 2021 with the exciting news that the Europe PMC infrastructure grant has been renewed for the period April 2021 to March 2026.

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. Thanks to the machine learning framework of Dr. Maaly Nassar for the joint EMERALD project between Europe PMC and MGnify teams, recognising metagenomics key terms in literature can now provide detailed biome descriptions for unravelling microbial implications in a variety of environmental-, engineered- and host-associated phenomena.

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. Currently, the full text of these preprints are scattered as PDFs on preprint servers, or, available as a non-standard set of documents for machine learning purposes.

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. This is a very exciting development that will hopefully make it easier to effectively track the impact of research funding. So what is the big news about?

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. In a commitment to open science, Europe PMC flags articles that are free to read and even better, free to re-use.