VecNet was founded in 2011 as part of the Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA). Today the number of malaria cases remains between 350 and 500 million people infected worldwide each year. A significant number of these are children and up to a million cases annually lead to death. The malERA experts concluded that progress with malaria elimination now depends on widespread access to, and the means to analyse all the existing research literature relating to malaria. Unfortunately by 2019 VecNet was no longer funded and even it's Datacite repository service ceased.
It has now been redelivered by Data Futures as an InvenioRDM repository, to ensure long-term sustainability as well as supporting ongoing work to eliminate the disease. This new initiative has included collaboration with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Literature Services (SIBiLS) to enrich the VecNet repository with MeSH terms and improve automation of malaria literature discovery. The prototype service available here (to browse, click the 🔍 above) uses the May 2021 pre-production release of InvenioRDM. It enables filtering of records from the original VecNet service that have PubMed Identifiers, and shows new metadata from the current PubMed database (click the pmid box on the left in browse view).
