Full text COVID-19 preprints in Europe PMC

In this pandemic, researchers have responded by publishing results rapidly, often through preprints. In fact, about half of the publications in Europe PMC on COVID-19 are preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal articles. Currently, the full text of these preprints are scattered as PDFs on preprint servers, or, available as a non-standard set of documents for machine learning purposes. This proposal is about making the full text of COVID-19 preprints available on Europe PMC, a large and sustainable life sciences archive, for reading and reuse via a standard XML format, alongside peer-reviewed full text articles. Being able to easily search and read preprint full text on a site already frequented by millions of users a month, means that they will be significantly more discoverable by people, and will be able to make use of existing infrastructure to integrate into the typical ecosystem of publications - for example, linking to related data - as well as being more open to scrutiny. This will accelerate scientific research on COVID-19, provide an opportunity to build new open and rapid publication systems, and form a corpus for future history of science research.