Imagine you’re a life science researcher, diving into the literature to better understand your field. What challenges do you find? What tools do you wish you had? As a researcher one faces many challenges, and one of the lesser talked about difficulties is navigating the published literature.

The year 2021 has been difficult for many people working remotely, including those here at Europe PMC. We have been unable to meet in person with the users and the wider community that drives this service.

Part of the appeal of preprints is the ability to post new versions, allowing researchers to continuously improve their manuscript and correct it if needed. However, in some cases the data or its interpretation presented in the preprint may be proven incorrect with time.

Keeping up with the current published research has long been a challenging task. With preprints added to the mix, research is shared much quicker, extending the reading list and fuelling information overload.

In May 2021, the University of Virginia Faculty Senate passed a set of Open Access Guidelines and Recommendations. This was the first university-wide resolution on the subject, though the School of Data Science adopted its own open access policy a few months earlier.

Along with life science publications, Europe PMC offers a way to search through biomedical grants from Europe PMC funders using the Grant Finder tool.

PsyArXiv preprints are now discoverable in Europe PMC alongside peer-reviewed research PsyArXiv’s collection of more than 14,000 psychological sciences preprints has now been indexed in Europe PMC, an open science platform that enables access to a worldwide collection of 38.6 million life science publications and preprints.

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.

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.