In October 2006 the Wellcome Trust become the world’s first research funder to develop an open access policy that required the research outputs, that arose from its funding, to be made freely available.  This presentation, delivered at the recent Berlin 8 meeting, reviews the progress that has been made over the past 5 years – […]

By running a search through UKPMC, then clicking on the RSS feed logo once your search results have been displayed, you can add a search as feeds in a bookmark to your browser. When new journals are added to UKPMC, the updates will alter your search (remember to refresh your browser rather than used cached […]

As part of the text-mining work being undertaken by European Bioinformatics Institutue [EBI] and The National Centre for Text Mining [NaCTeM], it is now possible to get a list of all chemicals cited in a full-text article at UKPMC and link through to Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) database for further information. By way […]

The Open Access subset of UKPMC articles – which as of October 7th 2010 contains around 195,000 full-text articles – can be downloaded via: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/ftp/oa The content are available as 20 zipped files, named according to the PMCID range that each zipped file contains. The files are updated weekly.

UKPMC users can now view counts and link through to Web of Science citation data for articles available via the UKPMC website. The UKPMC citations tab available on both the abstract and full text view of an article, already providing ‘cited by’ and ‘cites the following’ data, has been augmented by a WoS citation count, […]

An analysis of publication data for 2009 identifies a total 5263 Wellcome–attribured articles in PubMed, of which 2313 are freely available in UKPMC. This indicates an overall open access compliance figure of around 44%. Looking at the data more granularly, we can also see which journals are most used by Wellcome-funded authors. In total, some […]

You have probably used PubMed, or PubMed Central, the archive of full-text life sciences journals (both developed by the National Center for Biotechnology – NCBI, at the National Library of Medicine in the United States). Developed in close collaboration with NCBI, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) offers, at its core, the very same as PubMed and […]

As of Wednesday 23rd June, the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) Open Beta site will go into full production mode, replacing the ‘Classic’ service available at http://ukpmc.ac.uk. Unveiled at a showcase event at the British Library earlier this year, the UKPMC Beta site provides users with a single point of access to: 1.8 million+ full text, […]

At a recent PubMed Central National Advisory Committe meeting, David Lipman (Director of NCBI) gave a presentation on the current status of PubMed Central which included the following data: Over 1.9 million articles are available in PMC. (Expected to hit 2 million by end of June ’10); Participating journals: 640 full participants; 220 that participate […]

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 […]