Europe PMC is funded by 35 biomedical funders and charities. Researchers who receive grant funding from these organisations are required to publish any articles resulting from the research open access, and ensure that the full text of the article is available in Europe PMC in a machine readable format.
Funders need to keep track of the availability of articles they have funded in Europe PMC. So that they can assess compliance with their open access policies and the wider impact of the funding they distribute.
The challenge
Europe PMC has open APIs which can provide funders with useful information about the research articles arising from grants they have awarded. Research articles must mention, or be linked to, the relevant grant using a grant identifier. Some smaller funders do not have the in-house capability to query the APIs and create data visualisations. We set out to provide dashboads for funders using Europe PMC APIs to provide data visualisations and demonstrate the utility of the APIs.
My role as UX Designer
I started by interviewing some of the funders to understand how they were currently monitoring open access and impact of their funding. And to find out what data would be useful to them.
I then investigated the Europe PMC Article API to see which queries could meet funder needs. I used the Swagger interface in the API documentation to create and test out API queries. I stored these queries in a spreadsheet and then created a prototype dashboard using Looker Studio and Figma.
I got feedback from funders and my team on the prototypes and developed the designs further.
I worked closely with our front-end developer to implement the designs using Chart.JS and other Javascript libraries, for example for the date picker.
The dashboards have selection menus at the top to switch between funder and choose a date range. This relies on linking grants awarded by the funder to articles in Europe PMC. As part of this work we had to tidy up
I conducted a survey with funders to get further feedback on the dashboards once they were live. Some of the iterations I made was to improve the legends and tooltips for the charts to make it clear what data was being shown. I was keen to include links to the relevant API queries when users selected a dimension on the charts. However this proved difficult to implement.
Outcomes
The dashboards are publicly available on the Europe PMC website, providing a level of transparency for funders about compliance with their open access policies. For example these are dashboards for the Wellcome Trust, from 2015 to 2025:
Impact is traditionally measured by the number of citations an article has. As well as a citation count by year, I provided two more novel ways of measuring impact as follows:
- Funders encourage use of unique researcher IDs called ORCIDs. The impact dashboard shows how many articles included at least one author with an ORCID and compares this to all articles in Europe PMC.
- Wellcome has a policy that requires grantees to post a preprint version of the article where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak like the COVID-19 pandemic. I also included a chart showing the number of articles based on a previously available preprint article.
