We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Europe PMC Plus – the manuscript submission system for authors supported by Europe PMC funders. Europe PMC is the repository of choice for 29 international life sciences funders, who recommend or require that publications arising from the research they fund, are made openly available via Europe PMC.

Europe PMC is getting ready to release an upgraded version of Europe PMC plus, a system for PIs supported by Europe PMC funders to submit accepted manuscripts for inclusion in Europe PMC and PMC. The new version of Europe PMC plus has an improved design, and new features for creating and reviewing manuscript submissions. The new Europe PMC plus will be released on 1 May 2019.

Plan S is an initiative for immediate and full open access to scholarly research publications put forward by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. In November 2018 specific implementation guidance on the Plan S principles has been released to the public with the aim of gathering feedback from various Plan S stakeholders, including researchers, publishers, funders, and other interested parties.

Scientific communication does not stop at the moment of publication. Scientific discussions in the form of post-publication peer review can provide valuable insights for published articles, bring up an alternative research perspective, or even present updates for published research.

Data availability statements in biomedical literature Every research paper is a story about data. Over 2.5 million articles in Europe PMC contain data of all sorts, from microscopy images to bird song recordings. While in the past, a research paper might have deciphered a single gene sequence, modern experiments often produce gigabytes of information at once.

We are always listening to what our users have to say. And this week we are happy to present you a Beta version of Europe PMC with lots of improvements based on extensive user feedback. Europe PMC Beta will be available alongside the current Europe PMC website throughout October and November. You can access it at any time using the Beta link in the header of the current site.

From July 2018, the Europe PMC repository will start indexing preprints. Making preprints discoverable through Europe PMC will make the science reported in preprints more widely discoverable and support their inclusion into workflows such as grant reporting, article citing and credit and attribution. This blog post explains why we have done this, and discusses some of the opportunities and challenges that arise from this decision.

The Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo) and Europe PMC are excited to announce a new partnership to develop web-based, open source content and workflow management components that will enable ingest and processing of manuscripts. The system will be built on Coko’s PubSweet technology framework and will contribute to the vision of creating modern, digital-first technologies that improve the speed of research.

Several questions have come into our Helpdesk regarding how articles deposited in Europe PMC count towards the REF 2021. We thought it is worth clarifying a few of the questions that have been raised. Does content deposited in Europe PMC count towards REF 2021? The answer is definitely yes.

We’re delighted to announce that the Swiss National Science Foundation joins Europe PMC as a new funder. This brings the Europe PMC funder family to 29 members. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) supports basic science in all academic disciplines, from history to medicine and the engineering sciences.

It’s always frustrating to hit a paywall when you stumble across an exciting article. Until recently, for many of us the only legal way of getting hold of the publication was to purchase the paper in question. But that is no longer the case for millions of scientific publications thanks to Unpaywall – a free, open-source tool launched by ImpactStory – a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarly research more open, accessible, and reusable.