How a novel machine learning system is bridging the gap between advanced models and expert insights to accelerate protein research Proteins are essential molecules with many critical roles in the body. Determining a protein’s 3D structure helps scientists understand its functions within cells. This is crucial for advances in biology, medicine, and drug design.

As 2024 begins we reflect on the achievements our team made in 2023 to meet your needs as users. The team’s efforts were concentrated on building trust in preprints, open sourcing code, as well as expanding and improving text-mining capabilities. Preprint highlights

The practice of preprinting in the life sciences has grown rapidly. In addition to accelerating scientific publication, preprinting also has the potential to open new avenues of communication among researchers. For example, preprint peer review offers tremendous potential for changing the culture of scientific assessment, broadening participation, and enhancing the robustness of scholarship.

In July 2020, Europe PMC began indexing the full text of COVID-19 preprints. The initiative supported by Wellcome, the UK Medical Research Council, and Swiss National Science Foundation, has now made over 15,300 full text COVID-19 preprints searchable and free to read, alongside peer reviewed articles. Number of full text COVID-19 preprints in Europe PMC by month.

[More than 4,500 Research Square preprints discoverable alongside peer-reviewed research]{face=“"Open Sans", sans-serif” style=“font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [Research Square’s collection of more than 4,500 full-text COVID-19 preprints have been indexed in Europe PMC, an open-access repository of more than 1 million biomedical research works.]{face=“"Open Sans", sans-serif” style=“font-size: 11pt;

We are excited to announce the recent release of metagenomics annotations for Europe PMC publications. Thanks to the machine learning framework of Dr. Maaly Nassar for the joint EMERALD project between Europe PMC and MGnify teams, recognising metagenomics key terms in literature can now provide detailed biome descriptions for unravelling microbial implications in a variety of environmental-, engineered- and host-associated phenomena.

This month, Europe PMC released a new version of SciLite, a powerful tool for highlighting annotations in life sciences publications. SciLite is powered by the Europe PMC annotation platform via the open annotation API, which provides access to over 1.3 billion annotations.

[In this pandemic, researchers have responded by publishing results rapidly, often through preprints.]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [In fact, up to half of the publications in Europe PMC on COVID-19 are preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.

[In September 2019 we welcomed the first open, global grant IDs to Europe PMC. Wellcome became the first funder to register DOIs for their grant awards with Crossref. Grant metadata is provided by Europe PMC, and in a pilot integration, the grant IDs were featured in a ]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;

[Europe PMC]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”}[ is a searchable database that allows access to life sciences publications worldwide including preprints and micropublications.