Image Source: Serial/Trash People have little trouble recognising and following the beat in a piece of music. We can even continue to play the beat in our minds once a song has finished. However, despite the ease with which we carry out such a task, the brain activity which underpins it remains a topic of […]

By Elizabeth Kirkham, PhD student at the University of Sheffield Note: Elizabeth was the winner of this year’s Access to Understanding competition. Check back tomorrow to read her winning entry! It has also been published by eLife. Congratulations Elizabeth! My background is in psychology, which means that over the years I’ve learned to steel myself against the inevitable […]

Image design: Serial/Trash New research challenges common beliefs about the origin of the disease and draws attention to the nerve cells’ ability to tidy up. Parkinson’s disease is a devastating neurological disorder where nerve cells in the brain slowly degenerate and die. The disease especially affects a certain type of nerve cell, the dopaminergic nerve […]

Last night marked the Access to Understanding 2014 science-writing competition award ceremony. At its heart, the competition is a celebration. It celebrates the commitment and enthusiasm of early career researchers to share scientific advances with an interested public audience.  It’s also a celebration that all of the articles that entrants could write about (spanning cancer to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

With our new advanced search functionality, you can now do more, more easily. You can access the advanced search page here, or by clicking on the cog icon to the right of the search box. Key features are: Auto-suggest functionality on the journal, author, funder and grant ID fields Article section-level searching: where you can restrict your […]

by Emma Pewsey Winner, Access to Understanding 2013 This post is particularly aimed at those of you who are thinking about entering the Access to Understanding competition who have never entered a science writing competition before. Access to Understanding is the perfect first-time competition to enter. Unlike most other science-writing competitions, you don’t need to […]

Following the development of the ORCID-based Article Claiming Tool (see this blog post), Europe PMC has now integrated ORCIDs into its website, search systems, and web services. This is proving useful for authors who want to show their publications list unambiguously on the Europe PMC website, allowing them to show for each article citation counts, […]

We are thrilled that you are considering entering Europe PMC’s Access to Understanding science writing competition, in partnership with The British Library. If you are an early career researcher and have not already decided this competition is for you, let me remind you of a few elements that make this competition unique. 1. You will […]

Access to Understanding is a prestigious, international science-writing competition aimed at PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers, developed by Europe PubMed Central and The British Library. The winner will receive an iPad and have their entry published in eLife. Read on for more… For more information: http://EuropePMC.org/ScienceWritingCompetition Questions: Engagement@EuropePMC.org Access to Understanding is supported […]

by Emma Pewsey (University of Cambridge, UK) Winner of Access to Understanding 2013 X-rays can now be used not only to show where bones have fractured, but also to investigate why these bones break in the first place. Results suggest the possibility of preventing the trauma of thousands of broken hips using drugs already commonly […]

By Claire Sand (King’s College London, UK) Awarded joint 2nd prize for Access to Understanding 2013 For years scientists have attempted to harness the potential of stem cells for repairing damaged blood vessels. The tendency of stem cells to cause cancer, however, has meant that progress has been limited. Now, a team from King’s College London, […]

By Ian Le Guillou (University of Cambridge, UK) Awarded joint 2nd prize for Access to Understanding 2013 A mutation that allows cells to grow out of control could also provide a new way to target and destroy cancer cells. This potential Achilles’ heel comes from a mutation in a gene called PTEN, which is found in […]

by Nina Rzechorzek (University of Edinburgh, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 How do nerve cells die? Many human diseases involve degeneration of the nervous system – a system of interconnecting nerve cells, allowing us to sense and respond to our environment. All of these disorders are incurable and fatal. Most of them share […]

by Gráinne Long (MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 Cardiovascular disease (CVD) describes any disease that affects the heart or blood vessels, and is currently the leading cause of death in women world-wide. Now complications during pregnancy can be used as an early indicator to identify women at high risk […]

by Robert Hoskin (University of Sheffield, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 To what extent do biological and environmental factors influence how an organism develops? This question, often framed as the ‘nature-nurture debate’, is one of the most fundamental problems that science has to address. Within this debate it is of particular importance to […]

By Katarzyna Makowska (University of Leeds, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 Brian J. McHugh and colleagues from University of Edinburgh and King’s College London have discovered a one-protein switch that makes normal lung cells behave like metastatic cancer cells. This exciting finding, published in PLOS One in July 2012, brings us closer to […]

By David Daversa (Institute of Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 Most people may not think very much about reasons explaining the shape of our feet. For evolutionary biologists and designers of prosthetic legs however, this topic is of major interest. A recent study, led by Dr James Usherwood from […]

By Luisa Robbez-Masson (Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University, London, UK) Short-listed for Access to Understanding 2013 Oestrogen is a female hormone, produced in the ovaries, that stimulates the formation of the female sexual characteristics at puberty. It also triggers the growth of the breast tissues during the reproductive cycle and during pregnancy. However, oestrogen […]