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Europe PMC

EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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About

Launched: 2007
Record Updated: Oct 04, 2024
Discovery system
Europe PMC is an open access database of life science journal articles and preprints, which contains over 42 million abstracts and over 9 million full text articles accessible via the website, APIs, and bulk download. Publications in Europe PMC are enriched with links to supporting data, citations, funding, protocols, and peer review materials. Europe PMC offers advanced tools for search, retrieval, and interaction with the scientific literature, including Grant Finder, ORCID claiming, text-mined biological annotations, and more. Europe PMC is hosted by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It is endorsed and supported by 37 international research funders as their dedicated open access repository.
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Mission

To build open, full-text scientific literature resources and support innovation and discovery by engaging users, enabling contributors, and integrating related research outputs.

Key Achievements

1. Indexing preprint peer reviews
Europe PMC now displays information about preprint peer reviews on the preprint page and provides a filter to search for preprints with associated reviews. Preprint review links and metadata are retrieved from Sciety and Review Commons as DocMap files and processed using an open source parser developed by the Europe PMC team. This information is also available to programmatic users via a dedicated RESTful API module.


2. Indexing new preprint servers
Within the past year content from 7 preprint servers has been added to Europe PMC: AfricArXiv, agriRxiv, AIJR Preprints, ARPHA Preprints, EcoEvoRxiv, PaleorXiv, and Qeios preprints. This brings the number of preprint platforms indexed in Europe PMC to 32 in total, and we continue to add new providers as they become established.


3. Open source developments
Europe PMC has committed to develop all new code as open source. Recently we have opened legacy code (https://gitlab.ebi.ac.uk/literature-services/public-projects/textmining-annotator/-/tree/main/) to aid reuse of the Europe PMC text mining tool. This enables text-mining of biological entities in content that is not available in Europe PMC. An example use case is text-mining of chemicals in life science patents by ChEMBL.

Technical Attributes

Maintenance Status

Actively Maintained

Open Code Repository

Implemented
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Technical Documentation

Implemented
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Open API

Implemented
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Open Data Statement

Implemented
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Open Product Roadmap

Implemented
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Technical Attribute Statements

Technology Readiness Level

  • Actual system proven in operational environment

Code Licenses Used

  • Apache License, Version 2.0
  • MIT License

Content Licensing

https://europepmc.org/Copyright

Standards

Integrations

Europe PMC exchanges data with PubMed / PubMed Central, Agricola, Crossref, ORCID, Unpaywall, and many other providers. Further information can be found on the following pages: Content sources (https://europepmc.org/Help#contentsources); additional metadata (https://europepmc.org/Help#howcontentadded); links to data, protocols, etc provided by external partners (https://europepmc.org/LabsLink); text-mined annotations submitted by various groups (https://europepmc.org/AnnotationsSubmission).

Community Engagement

Code of Conduct

Implemented
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Community Engagement

Implemented

Contribution Guidelines or Fora

Implemented
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Community Statements

User Contribution Pathways

  • Contribute to code
  • Contribute to education or training
  • Contribute to user research or user testing

More About Community Engagement

Community Engagement Activities:

Dedicated staff for community outreach and engagement. Regular events and webinars with recordings openly available to the community. Developer forum for programmatic users. Strong user research program that includes insights from different stakeholder groups and informs the service roadmap. Free outreach resources available on a dedicated website page (https://europepmc.org/Outreach).
Europe PMC conducted a POSI self-audit in 2022: http://blog.europepmc.org/2022/02/EPMC-adopts-POSI.html

Policies & Governance

Governance Summary

Europe PMC is developed by the EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute), an outstation of the EMBL. Europe PMC is governed by an international, independent Scientific Advisory Board that advises the PI of the Europe PMC grant and the Directors of the EMBL-EBI. The Europe PMC Funders are represented by the Funder Committee.

Policies

Bylaws

Implemented
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Commitment to Equity & Inclusion

Implemented
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Privacy Policy

Implemented
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Web Accessibility Statement

Implemented
Applies to Website
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Governance Records

Implemented
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Governance Structure & Processes

Implemented
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Policy Statements

Board Structure

  • Advisory board or steering committee

Community Governance

  • Formal

Additional Information

Organizational History

The Europe PMC was originally launched as UKPMC, a UK version of PubMed Central, in 2007. UKPMC aimed to provide a stable, permanent, and free-to-access online digital archive of the full-text, peer-reviewed research publications. UKPMC formed a part of a network of PMC International (PMCI) repositories that included PubMed Central USA and PubMed Central Canada. UKPMC was established by a consortium of UK biomedical research funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation to enable researchers to comply with the open access policies of their funders through author manuscript submission. The partner organizations charged with delivering UKPMC were the University of Manchester (Mimas and the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM)), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBl-EBI) and the British Library. In close collaboration with the NCBI, these partners have developed the website, the search and retrieval system, integrated text-mining-based features, manuscript submission and grant reporting tools. The UKPMC archive was supplemented by the CiteXplore citations database run by EMBL-EBI.

In November 2012 UKPMC was rebranded as Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) after three European funders (Telethon Italy, the Austrian Research Fund, and the European Research Council) joined UKPMC. In 2013 CiteXplore was subsumed under Europe PubMed Central. Since April 2016 EMBL-EBI is the sole organisation responsible for developing Europe PMC.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Other

Current Affiliations

  • EMBL-EBI

Funding

Primary Funding Source

  • Contributions

Funding Needs

Europe PMC is funded by 37 funders contributing to one grant and funder contributions are based on the annual research spend by the funding organisation (https://europepmc.org/BecomeFunder). The next grant renewal cycle is in 2026. Europe PMC is also supported by in-kind contributions from EMBL-EBI. Funding enables the infrastructure and maintenance of service to be continued and for new features and developments to be added to the roadmap to support the mission.
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