Karger Publishers have introduced an open access option, known as “Author’s Choice”. In return for a fee of CHF 3,000, Karger will make an article freely available (at the time of publication) through http://www.karger.com/ , as well as depositing the final version directly into PubMed Central. Articles routed through this mechanism are licenced under the […]

The American Society for Microbiology have launched a full online only, open access journal, known as mBio. In an attempt to “break away from the current publication model”, mBio editors will “either accept or reject manuscripts and will request only minor revisions; editors generally will not require authors to make extensive modifications or perform additional […]

The Royal Society has announced plans to develop a transparent pricing policy in which the subscription cost of its journals are linked to the uptake of author-pays, open access articles. “From 2012 we shall implement a new and more transparent pricing policy in which the price of each journal is tied to the number of […]

Open Access can offer universities real cost saving benefits, claims Alma Swan in a report – ‘Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Univeresities’, published in February 2010 (download here: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/). Swan claims that the move to Open Access can ‘disrupt systems and processes that have been in place for a very long time’ […]

Four European research funders have today added their support to the open access repository UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) by agreeing that the life sciences research outputs made possible with their funding are made freely available through this repository. Launched in January 2007, UKPMC is a free-to-access digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences […]

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop in September 2009, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to delegates, to identify the different barriers (and the […]

Maney Publishing have developed an author-pays option for around 40 of their journals, including 15 titles in the health sciences with the intention to expand this to humanities journals in the future. In return for paying a fee of US$2,000/£1,250 Maney will deposit the final version of the article directly to PMC (and other repositories […]

The British Library have issued a press release to announce the launch of the new UK PubMed Central Open Beta website at beta.ukpmc.ac.uk: Helping researchers access and exploit over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers, on 12 January the British Library will showcase a […]

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) have announced that the prices for site licence access to The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports will be reduced by 9% in 2010, reflecting the increased publication of Open Access content in 2008. Only last month (October 2009) the Wellcome Trust called for greater […]

PubMed Central Canada is now live. PMC Canada is a partnership between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) PMC Canada is the second PMC International site to be established.

The European Respiratory Society, publishers of the European Respiratory Journal, have confirmed that they will shortly be amending their instructions to authors to add that Wellcome Trust (or other members of the UK PMC Funders Group) will be permitted to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed author-supplied manuscript (before copy-editing and publication) in PMC […]

The Endocrine Society – who publish titles such as the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Endocrinology – have developed an open access option for Wellcome Trust funded authors. “The Endocrine Society will offer authors supported by the Wellcome Trust the option of meeting the publication requirements of the Trust by paying for an […]

As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice – once through subscriptions and again through publication fees. The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access publication fees for […]

The British Journal of Cancer – owned by Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) – has chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for articles published under the BJC OPEN initiative. This licence permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The licence does not permit […]

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop on the 24th Spetember, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. The workshop was split into two sessions. The morning session focussed on the practical aspects of […]

The first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference took place in Lund between the 14-16th September 2009. The full set of presentations will be made available from the conference site within the next week or so. Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, spoke about the Trust’s open access policy, grantee compliance with the OA […]

The full archive (1947 to date) of the British Journal of Cancer -published by NPG on behalf of Cancer Research UK – is now available in UKPMC. Current content is embargoed for 12 months, though articles routed through BJC Open are made available at the time of publication. The archive was digitised through the Wellcome […]

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). “PMC Canada is a powerful tool that will help researchers build upon one another’s work and […]

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) – publishers of journals such as Cancer Research and Molecular Cancer Research – have announced the launch of their manuscript deposition service. Designed to assist journal authors in meeting their funders’ archiving mandates, authors of articles published in AACR journals can elect to have the AACR deposit their […]

UK PubMed Central development partners at the British Library invite life sciences researchers to take part in a short survey on images (takes no more than five minutes). The British Library project team, which manages development activities for UKPMC, and is specifically tasked with identifying additional, hard to find content to add to UKPMC, is […]

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced the development of a licence that will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. “NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” […]

The American Society of Hematology – publishers of the journal Blood – have developed a Wellcome-compliant author-pays option. In return for a fee ($2000), ASH will deposit the final version of Wellcome-funded articles directly into PMC, where they will be made freely available at the time of publication. Further, special licensing language has been drafted […]

The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (AJTMH) – published by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene – have clarified their author-pays option. For authors who select the OA option (at a cost of $2500) the journal office will deposit the final version directly in PubMed Central and it will be made […]

At a poster session at the Open Repositories Conference 2009, Peter Millington (Technical Development Officer st Sherpa) presented data on the number of publishers/journals used by Wellcome-funded authors that offered a Wellcome-compliant OA publishing policy. Taking a cohort of 3766 papers published in 901 different journals, Millington shows that potential compliance increased from 70% in […]

This presentation (to run, see below), given at the Research Information Network / Repositories Support Project event on May 29th, 2009, includes some interesting facts and figures about UK PubMed Central as well as a providing a brief outline of some of the development activities being undertaken by the British Library and partners Mimas, the […]