Europe’s largest store of open-access biomedical literature has joined forces with a leading online research outcomes system to connect research articles and grants with data on their impact.
Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC), a public archive of 28 million abstracts and 2.6 million full-text articles, has teamed with Researchfish, an online system for tracking and reporting on research outcomes.
Researchers, funders and members of the public will now find it easier to see which funding bodies have backed a given scientific article. Using Researchfish, researchers can link grant information to the unique ID (PubMed ID) of an article, but now Europe PMC will automatically make this information publicly available and easily searchable. Already, the collaboration has led to the pairing of over 80,000 grants and articles.
Many more funders now have the ability to highlight the value of the research they support; once the funding source has been linked to an article, it is possible to see the number of times an article has been cited by other research articles – in just a few clicks.
Smaller medical research organisations stand to gain the most from the new venture. Asthma UK, a leading research charity, can now more easily report back to their donors on the success of their funding, now that Europe PMC is integrated with Researchfish.
Malayka Rahman, Asthma UK’s Research Analysis and Communications Officer said:
“The collaboration has become an essential tool for us. Being able to report on longer term impacts is more important than ever for research charities - and having access to this linked research information through Europe PubMed Central and Researchfish is fantastic.
“The Researchfish system is now much more powerful with Europe PMC. The citation feature enables us to follow a research story from the beginning and see where it leads. This will be a huge help when we feed back to our supporters and could transform the way we show them where their money is going. We can now trace how Asthma UK funded research has been developed and built on, and how it might link to a ground-breaking new treatment.”
“With this new development funders will be able to work together to demonstrate the impact of research spend on the health and wellbeing of the public, which in turn strengthen the case for investing in medical research.”
Jo McEntyre, who leads the development of Europe PMC at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, said:
“Connecting grants to publications has always been tricky. As several leading medical charities use Researchfish for reporting grant outcomes, we thought this was a company we should talk to. Now, for the first time, many of these charities can show the impact of specific grants though the articles in Europe PMC. This innovation will ultimately lead to increased accountability and transparency for everyone. What’s really great is that the data on grants and outcomes comes directly from the researcher, so we know it is the most accurate.”
Frances Buck, Director of Researchfish said:
“The integration of these two systems presents an amazing opportunity for funding bodies and members of the public to see the origin and impact of ground-breaking research. We are delighted to be working with Europe PMC on this exciting project.”
