Vote now for Access to Understanding’s first ever People’s Choice Award

We are pleased to announce the launch of our first ever People’s Choice Award for the Access to Understanding science-writing competition! This award gives you - the public - the opportunity to read our shortlisted entries and have your say.

Our entrants rose to the difficult challenge of writing plain English summaries of research articles (all available from Europe PMC), which cover fascinating cutting-edge science including combining drug therapies to treat cancer, brain scanning to better understand specific function, a new way to assess effectiveness of arthritis treatments, and an analysis of malaria resistance around the world. The People’s Choice award gives a voice to those for whom the summaries have been written and allows us to reward the best.

Read and vote for the 10 shortlisted entries here. Our rigorous judging process has ensured the scientific accuracy of the accounts; what we really want to know is whether you like them!

Image Source: Shutterstock Copyright: bikeriderlondon

The competition will remain open until 12.00 on 24 March 2014, and the winner will be announced that evening at our awards ceremony. You can vote for as many articles as you like, once a day. We encourage you to share any and all comments at any time.

When you have finished reading and voting, don’t forget to tell your family, friends and colleagues. We know these exceptional pieces will be of interest to all!

By Anna Kinsey and Rebecca Withers

To stay up-to-date with Europe PMC news you can also follow us on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

Measuring up the competition

The Access to Understanding science-writing competition 2014 attracted over 260 entrants. As an international competition we were thrilled to receive entries from 14 different countries. This map pinpoints the different cities around the world from which we received entries.

Over 80% of our entrants were from the United Kingdom- with entries coming from as far north as Aberdeen. This map highlights the range of entrants from throughout the nation.

There were nearly 4 times as many PhD students (205) than post-doctoral researchers (57) who entered this year. This is an almost identical proportion to last year’s entrants.

Are women more interested in science communication? The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) reported that in 2012/2013 there were nearly equal numbers of males and females who graduated with postgraduate science degrees across the UK (43,455 females and 45,150 males). Our entrants did not reflect this, nor the current issue around women in science positions, as we had more than double the number of female entrants relative to male entrants:

Our entrants also really liked leaving things to the last moment! We received 69% of our entries during the last 24 hours of the competition, and 20% of our entries in the final hour.

The Access to Understanding 2014 winner will be announced at the awards ceremony held at The British Library on 24 March 2014. Book your free ticket online here. Be sure to check back after the ceremony to access the competition programme which will feature the 10 shortlisted entries, our 3 prize winners, these statistics and more!

Stay tuned to the blog for an exciting update about our competition coming soon!

This post is by Rebecca Withers (Science Engagement Intern for Europe PMC).

To stay up-to-date with Europe PMC news you can also follow us on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

Ever-widening resources at Europe PMC

Our External Links Service means that we link out to free resources that enrich our articles.

We started with links out to data (at Dryad), to full text articles not otherwise available from Europe PMC (at the Bielefeld University Institutional Repository) and to training courses for data resources (by Train online by EBI).

Since launching the service last July we've been joined by even more providers who have set-up links to an ever widening range of useful resources. You can now link directly to:

• Press releases by the Wellcome Trust press office
• Full text articles from the HAL-Inserm archive
• RNA interference (RNAi) phenotypes from Genome RNAi
• Plain English article summaries

If you're thinking of joining us, I can reassure you that the process is really quite simple. I've provided External Links to the Europe PMC blog so that the award-winning plain English summaries of research articles produced for our Access to Understanding science-writing competition are now linked directly from the articles about which they are written. I don't have any special computing skills beyond the usual day-to-day use of Office and internet and I followed the step-by-step instructions provided - I even felt quite smug about my technical know-how! It only took half-an-hour.

Image source: Shutterstock Copyright: Tonis Pan

Our recently launched new Advanced Search also makes it easier to identify articles with External Links - at the bottom of the page is a specific option to search for named External Links providers.

As always we welcome your feedback, and we would be delighted to hear from you if you want to get involved.

To stay up-to-date with Europe PMC news you can also follow us on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

Europe PMC moves into 3-dimensions

Europe PMC has added protein and chemical structures from Protein Data Bank (PDB) and ChEBI via the BioEntities tab.

There are some amazing examples in this paper, which was a collaboration between scientists in America, the Netherlands and UK:

'Supersite of immune vulnerability on the glycosylated face of HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein gp120'

The paper investigates susceptible target regions on specific HIV-1 envelope glycoproteins, and the abillity to now view protein and chemical structures really helps to visalise this research. 

To have a look for yourself click on the BioEntities tab for the paper, scroll to 'protein structures', 'data citations' or 'chemicals' and then click on ‘View Structure’ link.

It's especially enlightening (and fun!) to rotate and zoom the PDB structures.

Let us know how you get on - as always we're happy to receive feedback so that we can make improvements.

To stay up-to-date with Europe PMC news you can also follow us on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

Austrian Science Fund funding the metamorphosis of HSS open access journals

In 2012 the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research made funding available to help launch brand new open access journals in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), or to convert existing journals from the traditional subscription model to open access. Media owners in Austria were invited to submit expressions of interest. 36 expressions of interest were received, 19 were invited to submit a full proposal, and eight have now been approved.

Not only does FWF, Austria's central funding organisation for basic research, have one of the most comprehensive open access policies around, but it is backed up with programmes like this one to help the transformation. Aside from being a Europe PMC Funder (of course), they also helped set up Open Access Network Austria in 2013 to coordinate open access policies and activities of Austrian research institutions and funding organisations, and created a repository for research outputs which take the form of books, https://e-book.fwf.ac.at/.

 Image credit: SidPix, Flickr

For this particular programme, a stringent review process was needed to whittle down the 36 expressions of interest to the final selection which will receive initial funding of up to €50,000 or €100,000. The reviews focused on things like quality assurance, the logistics of open access and innovation. Falk Reckling, FWF’s Head of Strategic Analysis said:

The FWF regards that programme as a success. However, a programme like this run by a single country has just a minor effect on the publication system as such. Therefore, science funders (at least on the European level) should launch similar programmes on the international level together, especially by funding the transition of some outstanding subscription journals from all disciplinary fields. Otherwise, as the former FWF President Christoph Kratky recently stated in NATURE, the open access movement  is in danger of losing momentum: "Even the most optimistic advocates of open access to academic publications must admit that we are years — and perhaps decades — away from full conversion to such a system. It is easy to call for open access, but more difficult to make it happen. More science funders must put their money where their mouths are, and back their positive words with action. It will not be cheap, but the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be."

Further details of the review process and a list of the selected journals can be found in the FWF report.

Choose which part of an article you want to search...

With our newly released feature, you can decide to search just the methods section, just the results section, just the acknowledgements section, or a combination of 16 article section categories that have been identified in full text articles in Europe PMC.

Perhaps you've contributed to a paper by providing reagents, or technical expertise, to enable someone else's experiments. You might want to keep track of acknowledgement of your support. Now you can: the Acknowledgements and Funding, Materials and Methods, and Supplementary Data sections are probably relevant here.

Source: Shutterstock Copyright: teeranop

What about that great diagram you saw a few months ago, which would be really useful in a lecture you're preparing? You can use section-level searching to specifically search article figures. Of course, when you find it, you should check with the author or publisher that it's ok to use the diagram, and properly attribute it, but it is now easier to find.

This last example requires a little more time to construct the search (though it's straightforward to do from the Advanced search page):

Imagine you do research into Alzheimer's disease, for example. A paper has been published by someone who does research into another form of tauopathy, for example frontotemporal dementia. Because frontotemporal dementia is their particular research focus, the abstract will concentrate on the importance of their findings in this area, but they may well have relevance to your research too, and the researcher will very likely discuss the wider implications of their research in their discussion, perhaps mentioning Alzheimer's disease here. With section-level searching, you can identify these articles much more easily by confining your search to the Discussion sections of our full text articles:

(DISCUSS:"Alzheimer*" NOT ABBR:"Alzheimer*" NOT ACK_FUND:"Alzheimer*" NOT APPENDIX:"Alzheimer*" NOT AUTH_CON:"Alzheimer*" NOT CASE:"Alzheimer*" NOT COMP_INT:"Alzheimer*" NOT CONCL:"Alzheimer*" NOT FIG:"Alzheimer*" NOT INTRO:"Alzheimer*" NOT KEYWORD:"Alzheimer*" NOT METHODS:"Alzheimer*" NOT OTHER:"Alzheimer*" NOT REF:"Alzheimer*" NOT RESULTS:"Alzheimer*" NOT SUPPL:"Alzheimer*" NOT TABLE:"Alzheimer*")

I think this last example could unearth some information nuggets that are not otherwise easy to find. It would be good to know if it yields any articles of interest if you try it!

Source: Shutterstock Copyright: Andrey_Kuzmin

We'd love to hear how else you might use this new refined method for searching. Let us know how you get on - as always we're happy to receive feedback so that we can make improvements.

To stay up-to-date with Europe PMC news you can also follow us on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

New Europe PMC plus Watch and Claim features

Europe PMC plus provides manuscript submission and grant reporting services for authors who are funded by Europe PMC funding organisations.

The new Europe PMC plus features ‘Watch’ and ‘Claim’ allow users to monitor progress of manuscripts for which they are not a submitter and enables them to take over reviewing author duties for submissions that may have stalled during the submission process.

This may be of particular use for administrators, librarians and co-ordinators that manage Europe PMC self-submissions on behalf of their Principal Investigators and Authors.

While the features are distinct modules of Europe PMC plus they work well in conjunction with each other allowing a level of manuscript management functionality previously unavailable in Europe PMC plus.

The Watch feature
The ‘Watch’ feature allows you to monitor progress of a manuscript for which you are a not already a submitter, PI or reviewing author. Watchers can view manuscript information and submit a ‘claim request’ if the manuscript stalls.

Source: Shutterstock Copyright: Konstantinos Kokkinis

Who can ‘Watch’ a manuscript?

You can submit a ‘Watch Request’ for any manuscript that does not appear in your ‘My Manuscripts’ list. However, you must know the manuscript ID number; for manuscripts that are not yet publically available, you will be asked to verify your request by providing the manuscript and journal titles.

The Claim feature
The ‘claim’ feature allows you to take over reviewing duties if a manuscript submission stalls.

Source: Shutterstock Copyright: Tang Yan Song

Who can ‘Claim’ a manuscript?
You can only make a Claim Request for a manuscript which appears in your ‘My Manuscripts’ lists; this means that you must already be a PI, Secondary Author or Watcher (see above) for the manuscript.

Further information
Further information about the features can be found on the Europe PMC plus online User Guide.
Alternatively contact the Europe PMC Helpdesk: helpdesk@EuropePMC.org +44 (0)1937 546699

Post written by the Europe PMC Helpdesk Manager, Rob Rowbotham