2026-10-28 –, Naturalis 02
Recording institutional Open Science outputs is challenging particularly when organisations collect information across multiple departments and sites. Uptake of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for various outputs across people, places, and funders offers a solution. To foster an interconnected Open Science landscape, Europe PMC has embarked on two pilot projects with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and SciLifeLab to incorporate ROR IDs into the literature records. Many institutions generate and maintain publication output lists to measure their positive impact on science and society. Using human-curated metadata to link ROR IDs to publications in Europe PMC creates more open, reliable, and efficient analysis, monitoring and funder compliance checks, and demonstrates the value of upstream PID collection. In this talk, we present the pilot workflows, technical integration, and lessons learned to encourage wider adoption and reduce manual institutional workflows.
Recording institutional Open Science outputs is a big challenge, especially when an organisation collates information from multiple disparate departments and sites. The uptake of PIDs across various outputs, such as articles, data, software, and preprints, as well as people, places and funding, can provide a solution to this challenge.
Europe PMC is an open database of scientific literature. It provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources, available to anyone, anywhere for free. With Europe PMC you can search and read over 47 million publications, preprints, and other documents enriched with links to supporting data, reviews, and other relevant resources.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is Europe’s life sciences laboratory and established its Open Science Policy in 2021. Europe PMC is used as EMBL’s institutional repository for sharing its research publications. As part of the Open Science Policy, the Office for Scientific Information Management (OSIM) at EMBL oversees compliance with the policy and collects data on EMBL-authored publications.
Many institutions, including EMBL, generate and maintain publication output lists which have the dual function of measuring their positive impact on science and society and monitoring open science compliance among the researchers they support. These lists are therefore augmented with high-quality, human-curated, open persistent identifiers and links to other research outputs. However, these datasets and additional metadata often remain hidden in static spreadsheets and internal systems, making it difficult to share the information more widely, which can be used for meta-analysis or funder compliance, for example.
To foster an interconnected Open Science landscape, Europe PMC has embarked on two pilot projects that incorporate ROR IDs into the literature records available in Europe PMC. These institutional IDs are collated by EMBL and SciLifeLab staff, respectively, using the curation process described above. This increases the quality and trustworthiness of the metadata by connecting people and outputs to their institutions, allowing for reliable reporting.
A monthly workflow was created at EMBL to add ROR IDs to EMBL publications. OSIM pulls the publication data from the internal system and then applies site-specific ROR IDs. The data is then uploaded via Globus and automatically ingested into Europe PMC. The SciLifeLab has provided an initial dataset via email that is integrated to automated workflows internal to Europe PMC and discussions are ongoing for autointegration of further updates.
To date 23,910 records have been enriched with institutional ROR IDs.
Linking ROR IDs to publications in Europe PMC brings us one step closer to exposing rich metadata via an open and publicly available system that supports web interface and API programmatic access. This makes analysis and monitoring more open, reliable and efficient, and by integrating and exposing these manually curated ROR IDs we hope to demonstrate their utility and encourage upstream collection and delivery. This will ultimately reduce the need for the manual workflows currently employed by institutions to collate their outputs.
As an Open Science Information Specialist at EMBL-EBI, Katie provides researchers support and guidance on open science including access, funder requirements, publisher agreements, copyright, and data management. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Katie was the Open Access Librarian at King’s College London overseeing the open access team and the institutional repository. She has also worked at the University of Cambridge’s Scholarly Communication Office as the Open Access Research Advisor after receiving her Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia.