by Ian Le Guillou, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge Although contradictory to the hopes of the Access to Understanding competition, writing about the work described in ‘NLK is a Novel Therapeutic Target for PTEN Deficient Tumour Cells‘ made me realise the importance of scientific jargon. Yes, it makes research very difficult to understand for […]

By Claire Sand, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London The Access to Understanding competition had instant appeal for me because it seemed to combine my two greatest interests – science and writing. I have always been fascinated with the human body (particularly in disease), and am currently working on my PhD in cardiovascular research, […]

Earlier this month HEFCE invited advice on developing their open access policy in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Both EMBL-EBI, who run the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) service, and the UK members of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group, strongly support HEFCE’s movement towards requiring that all outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF are […]

By Emma Pewsey, Department of Materials Science, University of Cambridge. I’m a relative newcomer to biosciences – at school, physics and chemistry were more my thing. However, starting a PhD on the corrosion of metal implants in the human body meant I needed to brush up on my biology. It was time to hit the […]

Europe PMC is pleased to release a new RESTful Web Service, in addition to the existing SOAP service. Both Web Services can be accessed via the ‘Resources’ menu option on the Europe PMC homepage. As with the SOAP based service, the RESTful service gives programmatic access to all of the publications and related information in […]

We were delighted to announce the winners of the Access to Understanding science-writing competition at an awards ceremony held last night (11 March) at The British Library in London. Entrants to the competition were challenged to summarise a cutting-edge research article, communicating in a simple and accessible way what the research is, and why it matters, to […]

On the 1st April 2013, both the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK will require that any article which attributes their funding and incurs an Article Processing Charge (APC) must be licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). This blog posting provides an update as to those publishers who publish high volumes of […]

Access to Understanding is a new science-writing competition, developed by Europe PubMed Central and The British Library, aimed at early career researchers and PhD students. 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 Follow us on Twitter: Europe PMC news and […]

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 […]

eLife, the new open-access journal for outstanding scientific advancements, has published its first four research articles. First announced in summer 2011, eLife is a researcher-led initiative for the best in science and science communication. Backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust, the initiative’s first aim is to launch an […]

Have you ever wanted a JBC article and been irritated by the need to type ‘Journal of Biological Chemistry’ into your literature search engine? Have you ever struggled to remember what ‘PNAS’ stands for? – ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’ in case you wanted to know! The […]

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.