EDCTP is a major funder of clinical trials and clinical studies in sub-Saharan Africa. As a programme funded under the Horizon 2020 programme (H2020) and a signatory to the WHO Joint statement on public disclosure of results from clinical trials, EDCTP is committed to open access. Open access refers to the practice of providing online access to scientific information that is free of charge to the end-user and reusable. Each beneficiary must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to its results.

To support EDCTP-funded researchers to comply with the requirements to make their research output available through open access, EDCTP signed an agreement with Europe PMC. The Europe PMC platform provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It has multiple benefits to users. Articles are available full text and open access, and preprints are accessible and searchable. The search function is user-friendly and is applied to full text, so it is easy to find essential information such as methods within the articles. In addition, there are links to different resources, for example data used for an article, which can be accessed easily.

EDCTP-funded researchers will join thousands of others who make their published research articles freely available from Europe PMC as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of publication.

Training webinar

We invite all EDCTP grantees to attend a training webinar on 16 March at 09:00 UTC. This webinar will introduce the EDCTP open access policy and provide step-by-step guidance on how to comply with the policy and deposit research manuscripts using the Europe PMC plus submission system for inclusion in Europe PMC and PMC USA.

Acknowledgements

EDCTP’s membership of Europe PMC is financed through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) for a duration of five years. In cooperation with organisations, government agencies and the private sector Sida invests in sustainable development for all people. Sida has bilateral development cooperation with some 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

About Europe PMC

Europe PMC contains 40 million abstracts and 7.6 million full text articles, including research articles, preprints, micropublications, books, reviews, and protocols. Europe PMC integrates content from a range of sources such as PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Agricola, and 21 life science preprint servers including biorxiv, Research Square, and Preprints.org. Research articles in Europe PMC are linked to data behind the paper, which supports reproducibility. Articles are also linked to protocols, smart citations, peer review materials and more. Preprint versions are linked to each other, and to the journal published version, when possible.

Europe PMC is hosted by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an international, innovative and interdisciplinary research organisation which aims to make the world’s public biological data freely available to the scientific community. Europe PMC is partnered with PubMed Central (PMC), and endorsed and supported by a group of international science funders as their repository of choice.