Enriching Europe PMC with SciLifeLab's ROR ID

Europe PMC has long been at the forefront of ROR adoption. In their latest ROR-related project, they’ve used ROR in publication metadata to help their partner SciLifeLab, a major research facility and funder, make almost 17,000 linked research publications discoverable on Europe PMC. Read on to learn more about this important open metadata initiative.

Tell us about Europe PMC and SciLifeLab.

Europe PMC is hosted by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), one of the six sites of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research, and Europe’s flagship laboratory for life sciences.
SciLifeLab is a Swedish national center for large-scale research and one of the largest molecular biology research laboratories in Europe.

Building on an existing collaborations, the two organisations established a joint Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). As part of this the Europe PMC team has been working closely with SciLifeLab on opportunities to jointly strengthen support of open science.

How are you using ROR IDs?

Too often, research outputs aren’t linked to the organisations that fund them. Even when ROR IDs exist, they aren’t always connected to the relevant research, making it challenging to identify which organisations supported the work. This is the exact challenge SciLifeLab worked with Europe PMC to tackle.

SciLifeLab identified, through human curation, numerous relevant articles that they supported, which weren’t linked to them. SciLifeLab shared those article identifiers with Europe PMC, which linked their ROR ID to the relevant articles. This added ROR IDs to over over 16,500 items in the Europe PMC corpus, now openly available via the Europe PMC Articles API and through search on the website interface using the syntax ORG_ID:ror.org/04ev03g22.

How did you add ROR IDs?

The team at SciLifeLab have been developing ways to identify and link their research outputs such as software and data to publications. An initial step in this process is to identify their publication output, which is no small feat! SciLifeLab is not always included as an author affiliation so current advances in machine learning and AI would not identify this. SciLifeLab has an internal archive of publications that are produced by, or affiliated with, SciLifeLab, which is available via an published online web interface. 
In order to generate this list, human curation/reporting is required. This is a similar challenge shared by many institutions, the EMBL open science team included. Both EMBL and SciLifeLab will continue to send periodic updates to Europe PMC to keep the data current.

What else would you like to say?

Complete, open metadata is fundamental to how science is communicated, discovered and built upon. When the link between research outputs and the organisations behind them is missing, that chain breaks down. This work with SciLifeLab has strengthened the Europe PMC corpus with trusted, human-verified ROR ID metadata, and is a step towards a more complete and transparent scholarly record.