INTRODUCING DRUG REPURPOSING CENTRAL
The new diamond open access journal Drug Repurposing launching with its first volume and issue is an important part of a larger complex that aims to create an Open Science publishing environment for the drug repurposing community. Open Science has been recommended by both the European Commission 1 and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 2 to enhance collaboration, reproducibility, and digital interoperability for more effective research and, ultimately, new and better treatments for and with patients. The REPO4EU Horizon Europe project ( https://repo4.eu/) is currently building a European/Global Platform for Drug Repurposing. Open Science plays a major role in REPO4EU’s vision for an inclusive and sustainable infrastructure to support all aspects of drug repurposing. We are therefore proud to launch the first open access journal as part of the new Open Science publishing portal “Drug Repurposing Central.”
Drug Repurposing Central has been designed with state-of-the-art features that go beyond open access publishing to embrace a full range of Open Science solutions. The publishing portal combines early and open access to research results through preprints, with open and transparent peer review, open access publishing, open evaluation with alternative metrics, and links to FAIR and open data and software. In the field of drug repurposing, balancing Open Science with goals for patenting new medications to bring to market and guaranteeing compliance with data privacy can be challenging. The topics of intellectual property (IP) protection and data privacy therefore played an important part in the design of the portal.
Drug Repurposing Central ( Figure 1 ) will initially comprise the following core components, but its flexible architecture can be expanded to include future partner projects over time:
DrugRxiv ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/DrugRxiv): a topical preprint server focused on drug repurposing.
Drug Repurposing ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/DrugRepurposing) and Network Medicine ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/NetMed): two diamond open access journals.
RExPO Conference Series ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/Rexpo): showcase and publishing tools for the RExPO conference proceedings.
Drug Repurposing Research Collection: an interactive bibliography on drug repurposing research.
DrugRxiv: PREPRINTS FOR RAPID SHARING AND OPEN EVALUATION
To accelerate scientific discovery, many researchers are turning to preprints to share preliminary versions of their work, a trend that was turbo-charged by the Covid-19 pandemic. 3 A “preprint” is broadly defined as an early version of a scholarly research article that is made openly available in an online repository prior to publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These early versions are available for online discussion, which can take place in informal social media settings on platforms, or in a more formalized structure of platforms dedicated to preprint peer review. Posting a preprint can increase the visibility and impact of a researcher’s work. Within this context, a preprint server for drug repurposing was created: DrugRxiv.
DrugRxiv provides an environment for researchers to post early versions of their work as a preprint and gather feedback from the drug repurposing research community. It speeds up dissemination and opens up the peer review process. Peer review is an essential component of research communication, and the expert review process continues to serve as a guarantee of validity and a signpost of trust in the scientific process. Because of its importance in the validation of results, Open Science frameworks call for peer review to be made openly available to increase transparency. The DrugRxiv infrastructure based on ScienceOpen technology allows authors or community members to invite reviewers and experts with a valid ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) account and who have authored five peer-reviewed publications to review preprints. A peer review management system with a multilevel dashboard is available to editors to manage this process and ensure that preprints are reviewed by other members of the community. Authors can openly respond to reviewers and upload multiple revisions of their work. Versioning is essential to creating a flexible, living system.
Reviews are integrated with ORCID, published under a Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY (4.0), and receive a CrossRef Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in the peer review schema that includes the relational data (DOI X is peer review of DOI Y). This means that reviews are not only part of the published article’s history but are in themselves also (re)usable and citable, and therefore remain as permanent records of a researcher’s reviewing activity that can be integrated with ORCID, Reviewer Credits ( https://www.reviewercredits.com/), Publons ( https://access.clarivate.com/login?app=wos), and other review aggregation platforms.
New tools driven by artificial intelligence support the expert review process with automated scientific rigor reports. ScienceOpen has partnered with SciScore ( https://www.sciscore.com/) to implement a check for transparency and scientific rigor within the DrugRxiv workflow to ensure the highest level of research reproducibility possible. When a preprint is submitted, it enters a draft stage and the authors receive a detailed report and a rigor and transparency score. Authors may then revise, add missing information, and resubmit for a new score as often as required. Once the author is satisfied with the manuscript and the rigor and transparency score, they can continue their submission and the manuscript moves on to the next step. A similarity check run by Crossref/iThenticate is also part of the workflow ( Figure 2 ).
Because most patent systems globally have an “absolute novelty requirement,” it is important that the timing of the disclosure of data to the public is carefully controlled so as not to reduce chances of obtaining patent protection. Obtaining IP protection will in turn increase the prospect for successful commercial exploitation of the research and, specifically for drug repurposing, the effective repositioning of new medications. Making an early public disclosure, in an openly accessible preprint for example, might establish scientific priority in the community, but could irretrievably damage “novelty,” and hence patenting opportunities. 4, 5
As a countermeasure, an “IP check” was added to the preprint submission system to encourage authors at a very early stage to assess whether public disclosure at that moment in time is appropriate considering confidentiality requirements in view of envisaged patent filing. For Drug Repurposing Central, it is important to keep the long-term goal of commercial drug development in sight from the very beginning.
DIAMOND OPEN ACCESS FOR DRUG REPURPOSING
Open Science has a range of components and aspects, but the core requirement in all definitions of Open Science is publishing research articles “open access” to ensure the free flow of knowledge within the academic community and beyond to the public. The “impact” of research is often measured by the number of research papers that cite it. By this measure, open access in itself can greatly increase reach and impact. A recent study found that articles published open access in 2010 averaged 44 citations each, compared with 28 citations on average for non-open access articles, and that open access broadened the geographic and interdisciplinary dissemination and use of research. 6, 7 Therefore, open access publishing was an essential basis for the Drug Repurposing Central portal.
Because high article processing or publication charges can be an impediment to researchers publishing their work open access, 8 Drug Repurposing Central offers two open access journals with no publishing fees or article processing charges (APCs). By lowering the barriers to publishing open access, the REPO4EU consortium aims to increase the availability and accessibility of research and build a robust community dedicated to better healthcare outcomes through mechanistic-based drug repurposing and precision medicine. The two journals have different profiles and scope.
Drug Repurposing aims to provide an interdisciplinary and cross-sectional overview of the various fields of research and applied sciences that work together to make successful drug repurposing projects a reality. The journal publishes research on high-throughput and high-content screening, in silico docking studies, pathway-based molecular pharmacology, bioinformatics, mining of peer-reviewed literature, patent documents, side effect records, and design of drug repurposing trials as well as research that addresses strategic and ethical issues that are relevant in the broader context of drug repurposing, such as regulatory affairs, health technology assessment, and IP.
Network Medicine ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/NetMed) will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to exploiting the power of big data by applying network science and systems thinking to medicine. The journal will publish major breakthroughs toward mechanism-based redefinitions of diseases for high-precision diagnostics and treatments.
In order to participate in a digital network of knowledge, much more is required of open access than just making a pdf available on a website. Open licenses, persistent identifiers, controlled vocabulary, and shared tagging make it more accessible to computers for analysis and participation in the aggregation of scientific research in a networked knowledge base. Shared controlled vocabularies and persistent identifiers allows open access articles to more fully participate in this approach and support the goals of Open Science. New and useful identifiers that have been built into journal and preprint workflows are ORCID ( https://orcid.org/) for authorship verification; ROR IDs ( https://ror.org/) for author affiliation; controlled vocabulary for funders through the Funder Registry ( https://www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/); Research Resource Identifiers ( https://scicrunch.org/resources) for resources such as antibodies, cell lines, etc.; and open, machine-readable Creative Commons ( https://creativecommons.org/) licenses for open access (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). To provide a consistent, canonical reference and metadata set, all articles are persistently identifiable online and accessible over time by a DOI through Crossref ( https://www.crossref.org/). By building up and on a shared knowledge base, the research and publishing community can work to establish new markers of trust for the public.
All articles in the two journals are open for post-publication peer review and commenting. The versioning that is essential for the preprint server DrugRxiv is also available for all articles in the Drug Repurposing Central journals. Being able to address minor issues in a “version 2” can help to reduce friction and improve the reproducibility of the published scientific record.
By launching two diamond open access journals, the publishing portal will create new, high-quality open access publishing channels for the drug repurposing community with a wide range of Open Science features and a low barrier for entry for REPO4EU members and beyond.
RExPO: ALTERNATIVE METRICS FOR CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
The annual International Conference on Systems Medicine, Artificial Intelligence and Drug Repurposing, “RExPO,” is now in its third installment. RExPO24 is taking place in Munich, Germany, from July 3 to 5, 2024. Previous editions of RExPO were held in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2022 and Stockholm, Sweden, in 2023. The conference brings together experts and participants from a wide range of fields to share, network, and build up a drug repurposing community. An interactive and discoverable record of topics and presenters is integral to the conference.
Although conferences are an important part of any research dissemination plan, conference abstracts are rarely treated as a citable part of the permanent scholarly record. Within Drug Repurposing Central, however, the RExPO conference has its own discovery interface. All abstracts are assigned a Crossref DOI and thus treated as a citable research output. Authors can integrate their ORCID and add a full set of persistent identifiers to make the abstracts more visible in a wide range of discovery services, including Google Scholar ( https://scholar.google.com/) or Semantic Scholar ( https://www.semanticscholar.org/). Abstracts are published with a CC BY open access license.
Because RExPO conference abstracts receive their own DOI, metrics can be tracked for each abstract individually. In a digital context and with our current tool set, it is now very easy to measure metrics such as citations and usage at the article/record level rather than at the journal level. These “article-level metrics” can give a much more detailed picture of the impact of a research article than journal-level metrics. 9 In the past decade, the tools for tracking usage and citations of an article (with a DOI) anywhere on the Internet have greatly expanded. These tools can capture mentions across social media, news outlets, blogs, Wikipedia articles, policy papers, and patents (see Altmetric ( https://www.altmetric.com/) and Plum Analytics ( https://plumanalytics.com/)). By using advanced technology (e.g., Scite; https://scite.ai/), it is also possible to analyze the context of individual citations—whether they are confirmatory, negative, or even references to an article that has been retracted. Integrating alternative metrics into evaluation workflows can create new incentives for Open Science ( Figure 3 ).
Metrics available for each landing page are highlighted in red: number of publications, views, Altmetric score, reviews, recommends, shares, and followers. Search results can be sorted and filtered by various metrics. Some article-level metrics displayed in the search interface are highlighted in red: views, recommendations, collections, and reviews.
The Drug Repurposing Central portal works together with Altmetric to add Altmetric score badges to all abstracts, preprints, and articles within the portal. This badge opens up a more detailed view of the online mentions of the article including news, blogs, X, Facebook, Wikipedia, policy papers, and so on ( Figure 4 ). The implementation of such tools can therefore also facilitate a cultural shift in the academic discourse on what constitutes impact for research outputs. Each record page on Drug Repurposing Central (be it an abstract, preprint, or an article) shows citations, scite.ai badges with smart citation analyses, Altmetric score badges, views, comments, reviews, and so on.
RESEARCH IN CONTEXT: AN INTERACTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR DRUG REPURPOSING
In order to create a common, cross-sectional landscape that integrates the various dimensions of scientific, methodological, financial, legal, regulatory, and IP aspects of drug repurposing, the Open Science portal Drug Repurposing Central includes a collection of research articles drawn from the full spectrum of journals publishing relevant research. The Drug Repurposing Research Collection will facilitate the discovery and dissemination of scholarly work across disciplines and support research into drug repurposing as a whole. A dedicated search based on a definition of called items is set up to query content from PubMed ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) with automated updates on a daily basis. All content is open for comments, recommendations, and open, post-publication peer review to encourage further community engagement. This collection provides researchers with the latest insights into drug repurposing and supports REPO4EU’s mission toward an industry-level European online platform for validated precision drug repurposing.
Special collections can also be created as a showcase for the outputs of specific projects. For example, a collection that highlights all literature published based on the REPO4EU Horizon Europe grant ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/REPO4EU). A collection was also created for the partner project from the REPO4EU community ( https://repo4.eu/community/) Cures Within Reach ( https://drugrepocentral.scienceopen.com/collection/CWR_ALPS). The long-term goal is to create a comprehensive open discovery environment for drug repurposing research and to encourage participation through higher levels of visibility and discoverability.
Interoperability and discoverability are the assets of an Open Science approach. The interactive collection of drug repurposing research will put REPO4EU outputs in the broader context of the available literature and support the search for new disease pathways, technical solutions, and treatments.
REPO4EU is committed to implementing an Open Science approach to drug repurposing and leading the community toward more open practices and standards. The launch of Drug Repurposing Central marks a significant milestone in the advancement of Open Science for the drug repurposing community. By integrating innovative tools and practices such as preprints, open peer review, and diamond open access journals, Drug Repurposing Central not only enhances the dissemination and accessibility of research but also ensures rigorous scientific standards and transparency. The platform’s comprehensive approach to incorporating persistent identifiers, open licenses, and alternative metrics further solidifies its role as Open Science infrastructure. Drug Repurposing Central strives to become an example of open, collaborative, and impactful research, driving the development of new treatments and better health outcomes for all. The commitment to staying informed and adaptable in the evolving landscape of Open Science will ensure that Drug Repurposing Central remains at the forefront of scholarly communication, fostering an inclusive and innovative research environment.