As of Wednesday 23rd June, the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) Open Beta site will go into full production mode, replacing the ‘Classic’ service available at http://ukpmc.ac.uk.
Unveiled at a showcase event at the British Library earlier this year, the UKPMC Beta site provides users with a single point of access to:
- 1.8 million+ full text, peer reviewed published journal articles covering all fields of biomedical and health research (the UK PubMed Central repository)
- 19 million+ PubMed abstracts
- National Health Service (NHS) clinical guidelines
- UK biomedical and health PhD theses
- European Patent Office Patents, Agricola, Chinese Biological Abstracts and Citeseer databases
This content is made available to users via a completely redesigned user interface, which provides citation and full-text search; quick retrieval of relevant content; facetting of results; ‘cited by’, ‘cites the following’, ‘biological entities’ and ‘related articles’ links for journal articles and a full range of clipboard and export options.
In addition, the site has begun to integrate text-mining services which highlight and link biological entity types – currently gene/protein interactions, gene ontology terms, species, drugs and diseases – found within the text of an article to relevant external data sources.
Whilst of production quality, these services are still in development – for the UKPMC Beta site with its current functionality is an interim deliverable of a three-year programme of work which runs until June 2011. Over the next 12 months the UKPMC site and its services will continue to evolve. More information about this programme is available on the UKPMC website.
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UK PubMed Central is a service of the UKPMC Funders Group working in partnership with the British Library, University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute in cooperation with the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NCBI/NLM).
