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.

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 published open access.

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 medical journals. It was easy enough to find papers. However, it was much harder to determine whether they were relevant.

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 Europe PMC. With the RESTful the results can be presented directly into your browser using HTTP URL syntax.

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 an interested, non-specialist audience.

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 Europe PMC funded research and who have put information in the public domain to confirm whether

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.

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.

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.

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 new vernacular journal title search feature in UK PubMed Central solves both of these problems.