A commitment to open science

Europe PMC's mission is to build open, full-text scientific literature resources and support innovation and discovery by engaging users, enabling contributors, and integrating related research outputs.

We are committed to providing sustainable infrastructure to make full text literature accessible and preserved; enriching the content through curation.

1. Provide a world-leading, reliable and trusted archive and discovery system to deliver open science

   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.

   In progress & upcoming roadmap

   • Evaluate options to mitigate against nefarious bot traffic degrading the service provision.
   • Introduce consistent security scanning protocol for open source code.
   • Plan migration from proprietary database system Oracle to open source solution, PostgreSQL.
   • Evaluating the Manuscript Submission System (Europe PMC plus) to identify key pain points and improve engineering efficiency.

2. Ensure people and computational systems can fully utilise and benefit from the content and services provided

   Europe PMC is a vital and valuable component of processes, systems, and human interactions. It is embedded in the workflows of researchers, funders, the scientifically-engaged public, developers and text miners, and has a vital role in supporting agentic AI. Utility by these communities and agents 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 utility of Europe PMC services.

   In progress & upcoming roadmap

   • Build the foundational infrastructure and retrieval capabilities required to deliver AI-assisted literature search across Europe PMC including natural language querying and summarisation.
   • Develop a live, queryable database of UK public research funding of health research, enabling near real time view/visualisation of funding information over time, including rebuild of GRIST infrastructure to modern software standards (funding source: MRC).
   • Create a workflow to support Europe PMC funders' Open Access full text book policies (funding source: Wellcome).

3. Deliver trusted integration of open science outputs and identifiers

   Connecting people, institutions, funding and research outputs via persistent identifiers supports open science by increasing findability and provenance of scientific conclusions, in turn building trust.

   In progress & upcoming roadmap

   • Increase the utility of the Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) through searching and API endpoint for Europe PMC grant linking (DOIs) (funding source: Crossref collaboration agreement).
   • Integrate software citations into front end website.
   • Replace EBI External links with functionality provided by EBI search.

4. Support the development and adoption of open science workflows

   Europe PMC is a leader in open science and supports innovative and transformative models, such as preprints, to increase the sharing of open scientific outputs. Our ambition is to increase and improve discoverability, making outputs available for further scrutiny, reuse and integration.

   In progress & upcoming roadmap

   • Integrate links to DOME and BioTools repository into front end and API responses.
   • Improve speed of delivery of full text preprints funded by Europe PMC funders.
   • Evaluate OpenAlex and DataCite APIs as methods to enrich Europe PMC links and metadata for research outputs.
   • Enhance Crossref pipeline to index book and book chapter DOIs and legacy journal article.

Download PDFs of previous Europe PMC roadmaps by year and quarter.

2025 Roadmap

2024 Roadmap

2023 Roadmap

2022 Roadmap

2021 Roadmap

2020 Roadmap

2019 Roadmap

2018 Roadmap

2017 Roadmap

We are committed to improving the user experience of Europe PMC, by understanding the needs of the people and machines who use our literature services. 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.