As a response to the current pandemic crisis, organisations worldwide have increasingly made funding available for COVID-19 research. As part of the COVID CIRCLE programme, the Medical Research Council (MRC) has worked with the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR) and the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GLoPID-R) to make COVID-19 grant information from international funders more widely available and accessible. This COVID-19 grant data is now searchable via Europe PMC. Europe PMC, the database of biomedical literature, supports grant search via the Grant finder tool which allows searching biomedical research grants awarded by the Europe PMC funders. To date, the initiative has resulted in inclusion in the Grant Finder of funding information for over 1,800 COVID-19 grants awarded by more than 25 funders from countries across the globe. Note that many of these grants have been jointly-funded. The grant information is accessible to website users via a ‘COVID-19’ tab in the grant finder tool, and can be programmatically accessed via the Europe PMC GRIST API.
The team at the MRC led by Dr Ian Viney, MRC Director of Strategic Evaluation and Impact, has been responsible retrieving the grant data from the Covid-19 Tracker as it updates and feeding it in a machine-readable format to the team behind Europe PMC to load it into the grant finder.
Dr Viney commented “It is now crucial that research organisations focus on the gaps and opportunities in the busy coronavirus research landscape. Tracking the research underway globally and in a timely fashion will allow resources to be targeted to best effect, and with the launch of the Europe PubMed Central covid-19 grant finder we now have the tools in place to keep everyone informed.”
