The European Research Council (ERC) announced today that it will participate in the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) open access repository service, joining 18 existing UK and European funders[i].The ERC becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and the Austrian Research Fund.  As a result of this participation, the existing funders have […]

A Web Service of UKPMC content has been released, and is available via the following link: http://europepmc.org/SoapWebServices (URL updated 10/4/2013). The Web Service (version 3.0.1) is SOAP based and gives programmatic access to all of the publications and related information in UK PubMed Central. An example Java client is provided, together with comprehensive documentation on the methods available. The service is modular […]

The report of the Working Group chaired by Dame Janet Finch about Expanding Access to Published Research Findings has been published. This recommends a programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research. Better, faster communication of research results will bring benefits for public services and for economic […]

A previous post on this blog showed how the proportion of open access content in UKPMC was increasing. By open access, we mean “free to read AND free to reuse”, at least for non-commercial purposes, although all the content on UKPMC is free to read. At that time the trend reported showed that the proportion […]

Last month, the wettest April in the UK since records began, there was also a deluge of articles in the popular press about open access.  This is a round-up of some of the articles (and perhaps notable by their absence are any articles that are behind a paywall!).   Harvard backs open access in face of […]

Are you interested in finding highly cited articles? If so then the new features in UKPMC will be of value to you. Search results can now be sorted by the number of times articles have been cited. Each search result is now shown with a count of the number of articles citing that record. If […]

UKPMC Labs is a new component of the UKPMC website, which will showcase novel applications based on UKPMC content. The first application to be featured on the Labs website is EvidenceFinder, an application that surfaces “facts” based on a user’s search terms from full text articles. The user is presented with a list of questions […]

The graphic above shows articles available in UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) – read-only articles: green; Open Access articles: blue – compared to the number of abstracts in PubMed. For articles published in 2010, using the ~925K articles in PubMed published in 2010 as 100%, UKPMC is about 18% of the size of PubMed, with Open […]

SpringerPlus, the new Open Access journal from Springer (and based on the PLoS One model) is now accepting manuscripts from all disciplines of science.   The journal will accept manuscripts describing original research as well as case descriptions and methods.  The submission of data reports and large datasets is actively encouraged. All articles accepted for publication […]

The senior editorial team is today announced for ‘eLife’, the new top-tier, open access research journal to be launched next year with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. Read the press release on the Wellcome Trust website.

Yesterday the UK OAIG released research reporting on the benefits of open access to commercial companies and findings from a JISC Collections consultation on the practicalities of paying for open access publication. Links Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to Higher Education and Scholarly Research Open Access Fees Report OAIG press release (24 […]

Today is the official launch of the Royal Society’s first wholly open access and online journal – Open Biology. The new journal is publishing research in cell biology, developmental and structural biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, immunology, microbiology and genetics. It is overseen by a team of academic Subject Editors with support by an international […]

Dr Mark Patterson, director of publishing at the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has been named managing executive editor of a new open-access research journal that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust are launching next year. Further details are available at the Wellcome Trust web site.

In the latest of his Open Access Interviews, freelance journalist Richard Poynder interviews Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust about the Trust’s policy with regard to paying OA publication fees.

Project Manager for UKPMC We are looking to recruit an experienced Project Manager to join the Literature Services Team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus near Cambridge in the UK. The Project Manager will be responsible for coordinating UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), a repository of 2 million full […]

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has been awarded the contract to run and lead the development of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), the free online literature resource for life science researchers. Now five years old, UKPMC has grown from a simple mirror of the USA-based National Center for Biotechnology Information PubMed Central […]

Engagement Manager UK PubMed Central British Library St Pancras, London UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) is a unique, innovative online resource offering free access to full text journal articles, abstracts, clinical guidelines, theses and biological databases for biomedical and health researchers. As UKPMC enters an exciting new phase, we need an experienced biomedical researcher who will […]

A core strategy of the development of UKPMC has been to help users access, (through a single search interface), a range of relevant information, in addition to peer-reviewed journal articles, that could prove useful in their research.  Since the launch of the new service in June 2010, we have provided links to an increasing number […]

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The three organisations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields. […]

Papers published under the Royal Society of Medicine’s open access option (RSM Open) are now deposited in PubMed Central and mirrored to UKPMC. The open access option is available to all authors and applies to all RSM journals. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for RSM Open is $3000.  All papers published under this model are licenced using the […]

A new online open access journal from Nature Publishing Group, Scientific Reports, is now live. The journal is a primary research publication covering all areas of the natural sciences. The APC for UK articles has been set at £1,112 (from January 2012). Scientific Reports will apply to be indexed in all relevant databases and repositories, […]

We are looking to recruit experienced developers to join the Literature Services Team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) to help deliver UK PubMed Central. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a core resource for biomedical researchers. The positions involve a range of activities, depending on where your experience lies. We require people […]

Text mining features in databases are an increasingly popular way to extract useful information that could otherwise remain hidden. A new resource has become available to allow researchers to search for particular chemical compounds in biomedical literature. This task is often confounded by multiple names for particular chemicals being used in publications. Similarly, sometimes the […]

Competition in open access publishing is increasing with the launch of two similarly named online open-access journals. Open Biology (Royal Society Publishing) will start receiving submissions this July whilst Biology Open (BiO; The Company of Biologists), discussed in the previous post, is set to launch in the autumn of 2011. Like BiO, Open Biology will […]

The Company of Biologists has announced BIOLOGY OPEN (BiO), a new online only, Open Access journal publishing original research across all aspects of the biological sciences including cell science, developmental biology and experimental biology. Launching in Autumn 2011, BiO aims to “provide rapid publication for peer reviewed, scientifically sound observations and valid conclusions in these […]