Europe PMC to include the full text of COVID-19 preprints | Europe PMC Blog

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), we will make the full text of COVID-19 preprints 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.    “Being able to easily search and read preprint full text on a site already frequented by millions of users means that they will be significantly more discoverable by people, and more open to scrutiny”, says Jo McEntyre, Associate Director of EMBL-EBI and Head of Literature Services. “We will make use of existing infrastructure to integrate these COVID-19 preprints into the typical ecosystem of publications - for example, linking to the underlying data”.   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.   "The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to be the "Napster moment" for preprints, which in turn could herald a way in which research outputs are shared in the future.  Ensuring preprints are fully discoverable and reusable will help ensure that they are treated as first class research objects.  This initiative to make them fully discoverable through the Europe PMC repository will help to realise this goal." Said Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research at Wellcome