Peer review is the cornerstone of how we decide what research to publish. As currently implemented, it generally consists of two or three referees giving anonymous comments on a research article prior to publication … or … rejection. Much has been written about the failings of this process (a very small sample of illustrative references […]

We’re delighted that 2 new funders have joined Europe PMC, bringing the total to 28! The new funders are: Alzheimer’s Society is a membership organisation, which works to improve the quality of life of people affected by dementia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many of their 20,000 members have personal experience of dementia, as […]

With the Access to Understanding awards ceremony just about wrapping up, we can now announce the winners… First place was awarded to Philippa Matthews for her entry ‘Rolling back malaria: A journey through space and time’, which described research exploring the changing patterns of malaria risk across Africa. The piece was praised by our judges […]

We are excited to announce voting has now opened for Access to Understanding’s People’s Choice Award! The People’s Choice Award is an important part of the competition – since the entries are written for the public, we think they should be judged by the public. Click here or on the image below to read and vote […]

More than 300 Cochrane Systematic Reviews, funded under the 2007 and 2010 UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grant programmes, are available on Europe PMC. This has been a collaborative project between Cochrane, Wiley, and the Europe PMC team, and has enabled us to make this subset of full-text reviews available to access […]

Access to Understanding is getting bigger and better every year. The 2015 science-writing competition attracted over 300 entries from all over the world. But don’t take my word for it, explore the map below to see where they came from and what they were about. Globalised Science With 227 submissions, the lion’s share of entries […]

Guest post from Lisa O’Sullivan, Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health By now it’s axiomatic that the digital world poses new opportunities and challenges for researchers, libraries, educational institutions, and publishers, which must be engaged with digital formats in a sustained and thoughtful way. The realities of this landscape encompass challenges to […]

Enter a prestigious, international science-writing competition aimed at PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers. 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 The competition is developed by the British Library, eLife and Europe PMC for Access to Understanding. It is supported by the Europe PMC […]

Europe PMC does lots of things in the Open Access arena. For Open Access week 2014, we summarised some of them in a series of tweets over the course of the week. They are gathered together here: 2. Articles in #EuropePMC in the #openaccess set: http://europepmc.org/search?query=%28OPEN_ACCESS:y%29&page=1 … #OAfact #OAweek2014 3. Textminers: Access the full text #openaccess subset from […]

Evidence Finder (EvF) provides a new way of searching Europe PMC that will help you find the most relevant articles more quickly. By surfacing “facts” based on biological concepts, EvF enhances the Europe PMC search, targeting relevant sentences from within full text articles. Over the next few weeks, we will be running an experiment on […]

It is important that you add all appropriate grant information to relevant papers on Europe PMC to support: Grant Reporting Compliance with Funder open access policies Data Consistency     Resource Discovery Author Claiming There are a variety of routes that enable grants to be linked to papers in Europe PMC.  We have outlined these below […]

Recently Europe PMC released new export format options, to help users get Europe PMC’s wealth of metadata (and our open access papers) into the file formats they like to use. We’ve already posted about how useful this function is for researchers, but it’s great for research funders too. Funders can convert their carefully constructed search […]

Europe PMC has released new export format options, indicated in the image below: The RIS export format is typically used by Reference Manager and EndNote bibliographic applications for example, so you can now easily import Europe PMC citations. You can also email citations to yourself, or others, by selecting this destination option from the Export […]

Guest post from Alex Green, Transformation Project Co-ordinator, Wellcome Trust Last month saw the publication of the 2014 Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey. Combining responses from just over 7,900 authors who published with Taylor & Francis in 2012 (9% of the total), this represents the opinions of authors from across the world in roughly […]

New copyright exceptions to text and data mining for non-commercial research have recently come into effect and this is welcome news for UK researchers and research, argues Ross Mounce. Here he provides a brief overview of the past issues discouraging text and data mining and what the future holds now that these exceptions have been […]

Image Source: Serial/Trash Life expectancy has increased continuously over the past several decades, and with it, a host of new age-related ailments have emerged as contemporary medical issues. Muscle function decreases with age, leaving increasing numbers of elderly people incapable of being physically independent. This not only has devastating personal effects but is also a […]

Image design: Serial/Trash A number of genes have been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease, and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). However, the core biological processes involved in these disorders are extremely difficult to model and this is hampering the effort to develop treatments. If we […]

Image Source: Serial/Trash Understanding how blood vessels are born and propagated is vital for the treatment of a whole host of diseases including heart disorders, diabetes and cancer. Scientists from Oxford’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research have begun to reveal the mechanism by which the switching on of specific genes leads to the development of […]

Our External Links Service enables links to be created from articles on Europe PMC to free third-party resources that enrich our articles. Since launching the service last July we’ve been joined by providers who have set up links to an ever widening range of useful resources, including data underlying articles, press releases and plain English summaries, […]

Image Source: Serial/Trash There is good news for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers: scientists are a step closer to predicting which patients will benefit the most from a particular type of drug using just a urine sample. Imagine being in pain whilst carrying out routine, daily tasks such as opening a door, reaching for something in the […]

By Elizabeth McAdam, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, UK Note: Elizabeth was awarded second place in this year’s Access to Understanding competition. Check back tomorrow to read her winning entry. Congratulations Elizabeth! Writing always terrified me. Growing up, I didn’t enjoy English at school; I positively hated it. It all seemed to […]

Image Source: Serial/Trash Skin is not the only thing to wrinkle with age. Our genes also show signs of ageing – a process that can lead to cancer. A new study indicates that healthy eating can prevent cancer development and explains how this works. When genes get old Thanks to modern medical advancements, our average […]

By Lucia Aronica, Max F Perutz Laboratories, Austria Note: Lucia won the first ever Access to Understanding People’s Choice award. Tomorrow the blog will feature her popular piece! My research field is epigenetics, which means that I am interested in understanding how environmental factors can influence our genes and thereby impact both our health and predisposition […]

Additional new funders joining Europe PMC further expand the perspective and scope of the resource. Two new funders have today formally announced that they have joined the Europe PMC funders group, and in doing so the outputs of the research they fund will be freely available via Europe PMC. This brings the total Europe PMC […]

Image Source: Serial/Trash Cancer results from an accumulation of mistakes or abnormalities in genes that normally control cell survival, growth and migration. Genes are the instruction manual for our cells, and when these instructions are altered cells may begin to multiply (proliferate) uncontrollably. The resulting mass of new cells forms the primary tumour, and when […]