ScienceOpen and SciCrunch collaborate for REPO4EU

The high-priority, EU-funded drug repurposing initiative REPO4EU is launching an open science publishing portal based on ScienceOpen’s publishing and discovery technology. To increase the scientific rigour, transparency and reproducibility of the research outputs published, a collaboration with SciCrunch will provide SciScore reports for all manuscript submissions. The interactive portal Drug Repurposing Central will become a hub for high-quality open access drug repurposing research publications.

REPO4EU stands for Precision drug REPurpOsing For EUrope and the world.

The aim is to ultimately host and grow an EU industry-level online platform for drug repurposing with a global reach to move the industry from imprecise drug therapy to precision medicine. The platform will provide expertise throughout the whole value chain in drug repurposing – from freedom-to-operate analysis to intellectual property protection and business development, health technology assessment, ethics, and data governance considerations.

As a member of the REPO4EU consortium, ScienceOpen will provide the technology and run the Drug Repurposing Central publishing portal. Founded in 2013 and based in Berlin and Boston, ScienceOpen has extensive experience in open access publishing, open peer review, preprints, and alternative metrics for research evaluation.

SciScore uses advanced technology to generate a scientific rigour and transparency report and a score based on the methods section of any research article. These materials assist researchers, editors and funders in improving the quality and reliability of scientific research. SciScore was developed by SciCrunch a cooperative data platform based in San Diego committed to making research data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

Stephanie Dawson, ScienceOpen CEO, said: “I am very excited to be working with the SciCrunch team to offer automated SciScore reports on all manuscript submissions. Open Science is central to the REPO4EU mission. By adding SciScores to the publishing portal Drug Repurposing Central we aim provide authors with support for compliance with best practices.”

“We’re thrilled to be part of the Drug Repurposing Central by providing automated Scientific Rigor Reports to authors their authors,” said Anita Bandrowski, CEO of SciCrunch. She added: “Informing authors about their adherence to rigour and reproducibility guidelines, as well as the potential to take action based on the results is key to success. The inability for researchers to be able to replicate each other’s experiments and outcomes hinders drug development, increases demands on resources, and raises research costs, making it critical to address this issue.”