Svoboda | Graniru | BBC Russia | Golosameriki | Facebook

This website requires cookies, and the limited processing of your personal data in order to function. By using the site you are agreeing to this as outlined in our privacy notice and cookie policy.

Europe PMC Roadmap

The Europe PMC roadmap shows the features we are currently working on and future development priorities. The roadmap will be updated and published quarterly.

Europe PMC Roadmap - Quarter 1, 2024 January - March (PDF)

EuropePMCRoadmapJan-Mar2024

We are committed to improving the user experience of Europe PMC, by understanding the needs of the people who use literature services, including life sciences researchers, curators, developers and text miners.

Previous roadmaps:

If you would like to provide feedback on any aspect of Europe PMC, request a new feature, or participate in a user research session, please use our feedback form to get in touch.

Europe PMC mission and objectives

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

Europe PMC has 6 key objectives:

  1. Provide a world-class reliable and high-performance open access full text database and related services.
  2. Support and lead in the development of emerging open publication workflows.
  3. Integrate the open access literature with major research outputs and objects such as data, software, authors, grants and institutions.
  4. Build an open community platform for machine learning and text mining.
  5. Support open science through reuse of Europe PMC content, links and semantic enrichments.
  6. Ensure that Europe PMC meets the needs of all key stakeholder user groups.

Provide a world-class reliable and high-performance open access full text database and related services

We aim to continuously improve the quality and performance of the service, including upgrades to the technical architecture and processes, continuous monitoring of Europe PMC services, for quality assurance, and improvements to the user experience.

Support and lead in the development of emerging open publication workflows

Europe PMC is a strong supporter of open and transparent publishing workflows, one of the central tenets of Open Science. Our ambition is to archive leading new types of content, such as preprints, in Europe PMC, to make them more discoverable, and available for further scrutiny, reuse and integration.

Integrate the open access literature with major research outputs and objects such as data, software, authors, grants and institutions

Linking research outputs via persistent identifiers supports science by making related information findable and provides provenance scientific conclusions, building trust. In addition, it supports research reporting for funders and employers who need to understand the impact of research.

Build an open community platform for machine learning and text mining

We encourage text mining groups and developers to use Europe PMC content and APIs develop new technologies, which can improve information retrieval and researcher workflows. For example, text miners can access and mine full text content for biological concepts and terms. To date, about 10 text mining groups have uploaded over 20 different types of biological entity, with over 1.3 billion annotations altogether. All annotations are made available through the annotations API, which allows their reuse in other contexts and displayed to users of Europe PMC on abstract and article pages.

Support open science through reuse of Europe PMC content, links and semantic enrichments

Europe PMC contains a wealth of Open Access full text content and linked resources. We want to build on the content, links and semantic enrichments available in Europe PMC to devise better ways to search and retrieve publications and related content.

Ensure that Europe PMC meets the needs of all key stakeholder user groups

Europe PMC's user communities include researchers, funders, the scientifically-engaged public, developers and text miners. Usage by these communities encompasses a wide range of different tasks which may be scientific, administrative or consumptive/innovative. Europe PMC aims to improve the user experience for these user communities and encourage and increase their usage of Europe PMC services.