News blog

Updates from Europe PMC, a global database of life sciences literature

Europe PMC team

 | 1 November 2012

 | 3 MINS READ

UKPMC becomes Europe PubMed Central


We
are delighted to launch Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC), which reflects a
growing commitment from European Life Sciences research funders to make their research
freely available around the world.

As announced
in July, the European Research Council (ERC)
becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and
the Austrian Research Fund. As a result of this participation, the 18 existing UK
and European funders agreed that the UKPMC service should be rebranded as Europe
PMC by 1 November 2012.

The
service can now be found at the following URLs:

Europe PMC:                     http://europepmc.org

Europe PMC plus:              http://plus.europepmc.org
(For
managing grants and publications for Europe PMC funder-supported researchers).

Europe
PMC labs:              http://labs.europepmc.org
(For showcasing new developments based on the
content of Europe PMC).

UKPMC
was originally launched in January 2007, initially as a mirror of the US
National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central (PMC), providing international
preservation of open- and free-access
biomedical literature. The UKPMC funders require that research papers
funded by them must be made freely
available via UKPMC no later than 6 months after publication.

In 2010, the service diversified from PMC and introduced additional content including
PubMed abstracts and biological patents, with innovations for navigation and search. Europe PMC now provides
free access to:
 

  • Over 2 million full text, peer-reviewed published journal
    articles
  • Nearly 5 million biological and medical patents records
  • More than 22 million PubMed abstracts
  • Over 40,000 grants held by nearly 20,000 principal
    investigators allowing you to find out who is being funded, to do what, and for
    how much.
This content is discoverable via an integrated full text and
abstract search that is free to all to use, wherever you are.
You can also use Europe
PMC to:
  • See ‘cited by’ information
    for each article – you can now identify highly cited articles by using the
    citation sort tool.
  • Streamline your
    information discovery by directly linking-out
    to gene, protein and chemical compound databases, including UniProt, PDB, and Entrez
    Gene.
  • Stay up to date
    with new articles in your research area using the fully customisable RSS feeds.
A key aim of the rebrand to Europe PMC is to extend the repository
further and encourage other European funders of life sciences research to make
the outputs of the research they fund freely available through Europe PMC.

The
decision of the ERC to join the expanded Europe PMC resource comes at a time
when providing free access to research outputs is being championed at the
highest levels within the UK and Europe. 
David Willets, the UK’s Science Minister, this year committed the UK government to the principle of providing “public access to publicly-funded research results”,
whilst
Neelie
Kroes, V
ice-President of the
European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, statedwe need more
timely access to scientific articles in Europe. 
We need Open Access to scientific information
.  Europe
PMC is committed to playing a key role in realising these ambitions.


For the latest Europe PMC developments and more, follow us on Twitter: EuropePMC Updates

One comment on "UKPMC becomes Europe PubMed Central"


EUROPE PUBMED CENTRAL SHOULD MERGE WITH OPENAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe )

Openaire harvests OA content from institutional repositories. It is not a locus for direct deposit.

If EPMC is to help UK as well as all of Europe to reach 100% OA, it should become an OA content harvester, not a locus for direct deposit.

All OA content comes from institutions. To ensure that institutional and funder OA mandates are collaborative and convergent, rather than competitive and divergent, the specified locus of direct deposit should be institutional.

Institutional deposit is also the most effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance with both kinds of mandates, by recruiting the OA provider (the institution) to ensure compliance at source.

Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model

The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment procedures

EOS: New worldwide organization for universities promoting open access

Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access

Post a comment


I agree to the limited use of my personal data as described in the Europe PMC advanced user services privacy policy.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Subscribe to the Europe PMC News blog to receive the latest updates

This website requires cookies, and the limited processing of your personal data in order to function. By using the site you are agreeing to this as outlined in our privacy notice and cookie policy.

Partnerships & funding

Europe PMC is a service of the Europe PMC Funders' Group, in partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); and in cooperation with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NCBI/NLM) . It includes content provided to the PubMed Central (NLM/PMC) archive by participating publishers.