BACKGROUND: We present the Europe PMC literature component of Open Targets - a 
target validation platform that integrates various evidence to aid drug target 
identification and validation. The component identifies target-disease 
associations in documents and ranks the documents based on their confidence from 
the Europe PMC literature database, by using rules utilising expert-provided 
heuristic information. The confidence score of a given document represents how 
valuable the document is in the scope of target validation for a given 
target-disease association by taking into account the credibility of the 
association based on the properties of the text. The component serves the 
platform regularly with the up-to-date data since December, 2015.
RESULTS: Currently, there are a total number of 1168365 distinct target-disease 
associations text mined from >26 million PubMed abstracts and >1.2 million Open 
Access full text articles. Our comparative analyses on the current available 
evidence data in the platform revealed that 850179 of these associations are 
exclusively identified by literature mining.
CONCLUSIONS: This component helps the platform's users by providing the most 
relevant literature hits for a given target and disease. The text mining 
evidence along with the other types of evidence can be explored visually through 
https://www.targetvalidation.org and all the evidence data is available for 
download in json format from https://www.targetvalidation.org/downloads/data .