What exactly is Europe PMC? How is it different from PubMed Central? What can I do with Europe PMC?
Those are some of the questions I had myself when I first heard of Europe PMC. And now my task is to make sure that everyone can answer them easily.
My name is Maria Levchenko and I am a recent addition to the Europe PMC team. As a Community Manager I am responsible for reaching out to all of our users, informing them about new developments, but also gathering their valuable feedback, in order to make our services even more user-friendly and helpful for everyone.
My background is in biomedical research. I have also briefly worked at the European Research Council – one of the science funders that support Europe PMC – to better understand how funding agencies shape the way we do science.
My interest in Europe PMC stemmed from their goal to create a world-class literature resource. I am passionate about tools that help the scientific community on their quest for knowledge, and I believe that Europe PMC can do for research what Google does for our everyday life.
Our mission is to build open, full-text scientific literature resources and support innovation by engaging users, enabling contributors and integrating related research data. Europe PMC provides access and adds value to more than 30 million abstracts and almost 4 million full-text articles. All of the content in Europe PMC is free to read and we strongly support open access, in order to make the scientific literature available to everyone. On top of the core content, we see Europe PMC as a community-sourced platform for new developments that will improve the ways we can search, browse and integrate the literature with research data. We strive to be open about our work so that anyone can use the services and create new tools. We want to foster a sense of collaborative community, and this is where I come into play. My role is to connect with you, our users, provide you with the means to read and use the content and make your own contributions, helping to make Europe PMC a useful resource for scientists, developers and the general public alike.
In the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing news about our work, providing useful materials on how to use our service, as well as responding to your feedback.
We invite you to tell us what you think about Europe PMC and its role in your professional life. Leave a comment, send us an e-mail at helpdesk@europepmc.org, or connect with us via Twitter @EuropePMC_news.
Looking forward to hearing from you!