What research outputs did you fund?
Research funders need to track the outcomes of research that they have funded. To facilitate this Europe PMC has recently developed the Funders’ Dashboard, a new feature available for Europe PMC funders, which displays the profile and impact of the research publications in Europe PMC that they have funded.
How to use the Funders’ Dashboard
The dashboard for each of Europe PMC’s funders can be accessed by from the funders tab in the ‘About’ Europe PMC’s menu. You can switch to dashboards of other funders easily by using the dropdown menu at the top right of any Funders’ Dashboard page (see below).
Every dashboard displays interactive information graphics showing the availability and impact of research publications resulting from the funder’s grants. These are accessed via two tabs at the top of the page:
This tab provides information on the open access compliance of articles per year. Specific dates can be selected via the date picker on the right top of the chart. Europe PMC funders mandate research outputs of the research they fund to be made freely and readily available with a CC-BY license in Europe PMC, usually within 6 months of publication. This visualisation provides a snapshot of the effectiveness of a funder’s open access policies and allows for easy monitoring of compliance with specific mandates.
Making the data behind the publications freely available for reuse is an alternative way to measure the impact and transparency of research. Europe PMC funders can see the number of publications with links to supporting and related data over any selected year on the ‘Open Access’ tab of the Funders’ Dashboard.
The Funders’ Dashboard ‘Impact’ tab displays the total number of citations of the publications supported by Europe PMC funders by year. Again, it is possible to select the dates of interest by using the date picker on the top right of the chart. This enables funders to access research outcomes and impact.
The Impact tab of the Funders’ Dashboard also shows the number of articles with an ORCID in Europe PMC and the number of articles with an ORCID ID for each Europe PMC funder. ORCID is a unique identifier for researchers, which by distinguishing researchers with similar names, ensures a researcher is accurately linked to a citation. By integrating ORCID-linking, Europe PMC makes it possible for authors to link their publications to their ORCID profiles via the Europe PMC website. For funders, the use of ORCID IDs makes reporting more accurate.
A third feature of the ‘Impact’ page is a graphic presenting the adoption of preprint posting by fundees. Preprints are research articles that have not yet completed formal peer-view. The number of biomedical publications being posted on preprint servers has increased over the last 10 years and some funding agencies have changed their policies to promote the early posting of research via preprints. Europe PMC indexes preprints from several preprint servers, and links preprints to the finalised journal article version where it exists. The graphic below indicates the rise in the number of articles funded by a Europe PMC funders that are based on a preprint.
Collating the information for the dashboards
To improve the discoverability of publications supported by Europe PMC funders, a text-mining pipeline was developed that identifies specific grant awards in full-text articles (learn more by reading the paper by Parkin et al. 2019). This text mining pipeline located ~85,000 full-text articles that contain Europe PMC funder grant IDs and this information is used to feed the Funders’ Dashboard.
The data used to build the dashboards are available via Europe PMC’s open APIs, allowing funders to easily retrieve the same data via these APIs or the Europe PMC search if they choose to. Using the Europe PMC open APIs makes it possible for funders or other organisations to reproduce the dashboards or develop similar applications.
The Funders’ Dashboard facilitates the necessary tracking of published grant outputs by displaying up-to-date information graphics on the research publications funded by all Europe PMC funders. Europe PMC is proud to provide this feature for all of its funders. Please get in touch with the Europe PMC team athelpdesk@europepmc.org if you have queries or suggestions for improvement.