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 […]

The American Association of Immunologists, publisher of The Journal of Immunology, have launched a new, free service to authors, to deposit selected manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC).  Articles deposited in PMC are automatically mirrored to UKPMC. “Several funding bodies, including the National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council, […]

Analysis of the content in UKPMC shows an increasing proportion of articles are fully open access and thus can be downloaded, and re-used, typically for non-commercial purposes.  To be clear, all content in UKPMC can be accessed without any restriction, but only a subset of this content is fully open access. In 2001, just 7% of […]

A report published today looking at how to improve access to academic literature suggests that open access is likely to have the greatest benefits to the UK scholarly communications system. Open access, whereby research outputs are made freely accessible to the widest possible audience, is an issue to which the Wellcome Trust is firmly committed. […]

BMJ Open – BMJ’s new online-only, open access journal – has been launched. The journal will publish “all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low-impact studies”. In a move to promote greater transparency in the peer review process, all published articles include the reviewers reports, […]

A presentation by Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) given at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries that looks at the Wellcome Trust experience with the author-pays, open access model. Looking at Wellcome-funded papers published in the quarter of 2010, Kiley calculates that the average cost of papers published under the author-pays […]

Wiley have announced the launch of Wiley Open Access, a new publishing programme of open access journals.  The first three titles – Microbiology Open, Brain and Behavior and Ecology and Evolution – will all launch later in 2011. Wiley Open Access journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits use, […]

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced that they will be launching a fully open access journal  – Scientific Reports – in July 2011. Funded entirely through article process charges ($1350 per published article), Scientific Reports will publish “original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences.  It will not set a threshold […]

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. UKPMC is now “Zotero enabled”, which means that users can store the bibliographic details of any UKPMC […]

The complete archive of the Eugenics Review journal – from 1909 through to 1968 when the title ceased – has been digitised through the Wellcome Library’s Backfile Digitisation Project, and is now freely available at UKPMC and PubMed Central. As the official journal of the Eugenics Education Society (later known as just the Eugenics Society) […]

A new study commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange argues that there can be benefits to publishers if they switch to a model based on submission fees. The report “Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?”, written by Mark Ware, concludes that this model could be particularly relevant to journals with a […]

Over 240 National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) trainees recently attended the 4th Annual meeting at the Midlands Hotel in Manchester (November 30th – December 1st). Despite the freezing temperatures outside, the atmosphere inside was warm, welcoming and friendly. The term ‘trainee’ is probably quite inappropriate, as it evokes the image of fresh young graduates. […]

At the Wellcome Trust we are always keen to try new ways to promote our open access policy, and the UKPMC repository. Our latest promotional activity involves a huge poster in the rear window (Gower Place) of the Wellcome Trust HQ, in London. In addition to promoting OA, the poster also provides the opportunity for […]

The Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy has always made it clear that it considers dissemination costs as legitimate research costs and as such provides grantholders with additional funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges. In view of this I thought it would be interesting to see how many papers, attributed to the Wellcome […]

The Company of Biologists (COB) – publishers of Development and Journal of Cell Science – has developed an open access (“gold”) option, which meets the requirements of the UKPMC Funders’ Group. For a fee of £1350, the COB will deposit the final version of the article in PubMed Central (at the time of publication) and […]

In response to user feedback, the UKPMC search results page now displays all the authors associated with any published article. Prior to this change, the search results page had shown just the first seven authors, with the full set of authors only being visible from the abstract and full-text views. Further feedback on the UKPMC […]