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 a new project, supported by Wellcome in partnership with the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the full text of COVID-19 preprints are being made available on Europe PMC, a large and sustainable life sciences archive, for reading and reuse via a standard XML format, alongside peer reviewed full text articles.
This will accelerate scientific research on COVID-19, provide an opportunity to build new open and rapid publication systems, and form a corpus for future history of science research.
In the coming weeks and months, Europe PMC will be engaging with preprint servers and preprint authors to make as many COVID-19 preprints as possible available for reading and reuse. If you are the corresponding author on a preprint on SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, published on one of the major preprint platforms, you will soon be asked to review the Europe PMC version of your work.
Europe PMC has been indexing preprint abstracts since 2018 and has the experience in managing full text workflows at large scale. A total of approximately 150K preprint abstracts currently sit among all of PubMed (31M abstracts) and 6M full text articles shared with PMC in the USA. These are XML-based workflows based on international standards (JATS). Europe PMC has played a leading role in preprint community standards development and has hands-on expertise in publication workflows that include versions across multiple sources with diverse approaches.
In addition, Europe PMC has several mechanisms to integrate related material - whether it is data behind the paper to substantiate conclusions, ORCID claiming of preprints, inclusion of preprints in citation networks, or to comments on peer review platforms, impact metrics, or links to reagents.
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