Europe PMC Team

In an exciting new development, Europe PMC now provides direct links from articles to relevant externally held information, and enables third parties to suggest relevant resources that enrich our existing content. The External Links Service is a mechanism for people to publish links from articles in Europe PMC to related information or tools.

New Europe PMC External Links Service: enabling access to more resources

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.

New science-writing competition now open!

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 based on the search terms.

Introducing UKPMC Labs

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 service is welcomed.

All authors now displayed in UKPMC search results

There is now a ‘ Resources and Media ‘ section on the UK PubMed Central website. So far this includes:

 Focus group highlights – 2 minute streaming video

In late February members of the UK PubMed Central project team ran a focus group at the University of Oxford. 18 PubMed Central users attended, including researchers, technologists and librarians working within the biomedical and health communities.

Resources for researchers now on UK PubMed Central website

The year 2020 was marked by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Europe PMC team, like many others around the world, started to work from home.

Europe PMC in 2020: a year review

[More than 4,500 Research Square preprints discoverable alongside peer-reviewed research]{face=“"Open Sans", sans-serif” style=“font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;”}  [Research Square’s collection of more than 4,500 full-text COVID-19 preprints have been indexed in Europe PMC, an open-access repository of more than 1 million biomedical research works.]{face=“"Open Sans", sans-serif” style=“font-size: 11pt;

Research Square’s Full-text COVID-19 Preprints Now Indexed in Europe PMC

[Europe PMC]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”}[ is a searchable database that allows access to life sciences publications worldwide including preprints and micropublications.

Five stories showing how Europe PMC is used by the life sciences community

What research outputs did you fund?

[Research funders need to track the outcomes of research that they have funded. To facilitate this Europe PMC has recently developed the ]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;

Europe PMC Funders’ Dashboard

[It’s time to embrace change. Today Europe PMC proudly unveils a new website, packed with useful features. ]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”}[The improved Europe PMC offers a better search and reading experience, as well as better access to data.]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;”}  []{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;

The new Europe PMC is here

[Several questions have come into our Helpdesk regarding how articles deposited in Europe PMC count towards the REF 2021. We thought it is worth clarifying a few of the questions that have been raised.]{style=“background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”}  [Does content ]{style=“color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;

Europe PMC and the Research Excellence Framework 2021 (REF 2021)

[The PubMed Central International (PMCI) network is a collaborative effort between the PMCI repositories, publishers, and funding organisations that wish to preserve and provide free access to journal articles authored by the researchers they support. For many years, the PMCI network has consisted of three nodes, PMC USA, Europe PMC and PMC Canada.

PubMed Central Canada is retiring: response from Europe PMC

[We are excited to announce the launch of Europe PMC Annotations API, which provides programmatic access to annotations text-mined from biomedical abstracts and open access full text articles. The Annotations API is a part of Europe PMC’s programmatic tools suit and is freely available on the Europe PMC website: ]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;

Harness the power of text-mining for biomedical discovery: introducing Europe PMC Annotations API

[This has been a very busy and fruitful year for Europe PMC. With holidays approaching we take a look back at some of the Europe PMC achievements and milestones of 2016.]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;”}  [We kicked off in January with a new, mobile-friendly ]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;”}[homepage]{style=“color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial";

Europe PMC – a year in review

[What exactly is Europe PMC? How is it different from PubMed Central? What can I do with Europe PMC?]{style=“font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}  [Those are some of the questions I had myself when I first heard of Europe PMC.

Growing connections: new Community Manager at Europe PMC

We’re delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Sciences has joined Europe PMC as a new funder, bringing the total funders to 27.    The Academy of Medical Sciences represents the diverse spectrum of medical science – from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery. Their mission is to promote medical science and its translation into benefits for society.

Academy of Medical Sciences joins Europe PMC

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr.

Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr. Our search has been using a Lucene-based index and customised query handler for several years.

Search improvements

We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time. With over 2.2 million articles in Europe PMC linked to about 172,000 unique ORCIDs, we expect this feature to be of wide interest to publishing researchers, journals, funders, and others interested in scientific credit.

Open Author Profiles at Europe PMC: ORCIDs in Action

[Since our blog post last summer on the inclusion of Wikipedia as an external links provider, we have been lucky to host an intern, Tom Arrow,  who has spent the last few months investigating possible further connections between Wikimedia projects and Europe PMC.

Europe PMC, Wikipedia and Wikidata – opportunities for deeper integration

Europe PMC Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life sciences, healthcare and medical humanities. It includes full text reports from government agencies, like the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the US’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and content allowed by participating publishers.

Calling all bookworms&#8230;

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.

A step towards open peer review

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.

The Europe PMC funders&#8217; group is expanding&#8230;

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 for its enthusiasm, clear writing style, and sense of narrative;

Access to Understanding 2015: Who Won What?

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 for one of the 12 shortlisted entries.

Vote now for the Access to Understanding People’s Choice Award

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 for free via Europe PMC with the functionality that papers in Europe PMC enjoy.

Health care and health policy reviews now available: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

Guest post from Alex Green, Transformation Project Co-ordinator, Wellcome Trust

Last month saw the publication of the 2014 Taylor &amp; Francis Open Access Survey. Combining responses from just over 7,900 authors who published with Taylor &amp; Francis in 2012 (9% of the total), this represents the opinions of authors from across the world in roughly the proportions they have published with Taylor &amp;

Taylor &#038; Francis Open Access Survey: translating values into licences

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 menu and filling in the required address fields.

New export options now available: use Europe PMC to populate your bibliographic references in EndNote, Reference Manager etc.

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 introduced.

The right to read is the right to mine: Text and data mining copyright exceptions introduced in the UK.

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.

The TBPH gene – Do neurodegenerative diseases have a fly in the ointment?

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 major public health issue.

Let’s (not) Get Physical: the Effect of Spironolactone on Muscle Strength in the Elderly

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, and article full text not otherwise held by Europe PMC – to name but a few. We now

Now available: use DOIs with our External Links Service

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 Understa


 nding

competition. Check back tomorrow to read her winning entry. Congratulations Elizabeth! Writing always terrified me. Growing up, I didn’t enjoy English at school;

Simplicity is sometimes best

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 funders to 26, and marks a steady growth in the open access commitment of research funders.

World Health Organization joins Europe PMC

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 to diseases. This scientific passion inspired me to write about Dr.

Challenging language barriers

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.

A two-pronged attack to stop cancer in its tracks

By Clare Finlay, a PhD student at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Disease, King’s College London Note: Clare was highly commended for her entry. Check back tomorrow to read her brilliant summary on the blog.

“So what exactly do you do?”

By Claire Sand, PhD student at King’s College London Note: Claire Sand was highly commended for her entry this year. She was a joint second-place winner in

 Access to Understanding

2013 competition. Check back tomorrow to read her entry. After my fantastic experience at

 Access to Understanding

2013, I was very keen to be involved again this year.

Out of my comfort zone

Image design: Serial/Trash Malaria claims a million lives a year, a majority of which are children, and threatens the lives of billions more within its tropical ranges.

Populations within populations: drug resistance and malaria control

By Aidan Maartens, Post-doc student at the Gurdon Institute  Note: Aidan was awarded third place in this year’s

 Access to Understa


 nding

competition. Check back tomorrow to read his winning entry! Congratulations Aidan!

A night at the Oscars

By Elizabeth Kirkham, PhD student at the University of Sheffield Note: Elizabeth was the winner of this year’s

 Access to Understanding

competition. Check back tomorrow to read her winning entry! It has also been published by eLife. Congratulations Elizabeth!

&#8220;Can you read my mind?&#8221;

Image design: Serial/Trash New research challenges common beliefs about the origin of the disease and draws attention to the nerve cells’ ability to tidy up. Parkinson’s disease is a devastating neurological disorder where nerve cells in the brain slowly degenerate and die. The disease especially affects a certain type of nerve cell, the dopaminergic nerve cells, which are located in a small area of the brain called the substantia nigra.

Can a garbage strike in nerve cells cause Parkinson&#8217;s disease?

Our External Links Service means that we link out to free resources that enrich our articles.

Ever-widening resources at Europe PMC

We are pleased to announce the launch of our first ever People’s Choice Award for the

 Access to Understanding

science-writing competition! This award gives you – the public – the opportunity to read our shortlisted entries and have your say.

Vote now for Access to Understanding’s first ever People’s Choice Award

The

 Access to Understanding

science-writing competition 2014 attracted over 260 entrants. As an international competition we were thrilled to receive entries from 14 different countries. This map pinpoints the different cities around the world from which we received entries. Over 80% of our entrants were from the United Kingdom- with entries coming from as far north as Aberdeen.

Measuring up the competition

Europe PMC has added protein and chemical structures from Protein Data Bank (PDB) and ChEBI via the BioEntities tab.

Europe PMC moves into 3-dimensions

In 2012 the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research made funding available to help launch brand new open access journals in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), or to convert existing journals from the traditional subscription model to open access. Media owners in Austria were invited to submit expressions of interest.

Austrian Science Fund funding the metamorphosis of HSS open access journals

With our new advanced search functionality, you can now do more, more easily. You can access the advanced search page here, or by clicking on the cog icon to the right of the search box.

Refine your search with our new advanced search functionality&#8230;

Following the development of the ORCID-based Article Claiming Tool (see this blog post), Europe PMC has now integrated ORCIDs into its website, search systems, and web services. This is proving useful for authors who want to show their publications list unambiguously on the Europe PMC website, allowing them to show for each article citation counts, linked data sets, and full text availability in Europe PMC.

ORCIDs in Europe PMC

We are thrilled that you are considering entering Europe PMC’s

 Access to Understanding

science writing competition, in partnership with The British Library. If you are an early career researcher and have not already decided this competition is for you, let me remind you of a few elements that make this competition unique.

Five reasons to enter Access to Understanding

Access to Understanding

is a prestigious, international science-writing competition aimed at PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers, developed by Europe PubMed Central and The British Library.

Science-writing competition now open!

By Claire Sand (King’s College London, UK) Awarded joint 2nd prize for

 Access to Understanding

2013 For years scientists have attempted to harness the potential of stem cells for repairing damaged blood vessels. The tendency of stem cells to cause cancer, however, has meant that progress has been limited.

Blood Vessels from Skin: The New Frontier in Tissue Engineering

by Emma Pewsey (University of Cambridge, UK) Winner of

 Access to Understanding

2013 X-rays can now be used not only to show where bones have fractured, but also to investigate why these bones break in the first place. Results suggest the possibility of preventing the trauma of thousands of broken hips using drugs already commonly used for treating osteoporosis. Normal healthy bones can be thought of as nature’s scaffold poles.

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

by Nina Rzechorzek (University of Edinburgh, UK) Short-listed for

 Access to Understanding

2013



 How do nerve cells die?

Many human diseases involve degeneration of the nervous system – a system of interconnecting nerve cells, allowing us to sense and respond to our environment. All of these disorders are incurable and fatal. Most of them share a common feature – aggregation of abnormal protein within nerve cells.

A window into brain disease is only skin deep

by Robert Hoskin (University of Sheffield, UK) Short-listed for

 Access to Understanding

2013 To what extent do biological and environmental factors influence how an organism develops? This question, often framed as the ‘nature-nurture debate’, is one of the most fundamental problems that science has to address.

Genetic study reveals that a significant proportion of intelligence is inherited

By Katarzyna Makowska (University of Leeds, UK) Short-listed for

 Access to Understanding

2013 Brian J. McHugh and colleagues from University of Edinburgh and King’s College London have discovered a one-protein switch that makes normal lung cells behave like metastatic cancer cells. This exciting finding, published in PLOS One in July 2012, brings us closer to conquering lung cancer.

“Will you just stand still?” Scientists gain insight into metastatic lung cancer

This post is by our guest, Dr Stephen Pinfield, a Senior Lecturer in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.

Medical research charities and Open Access

By David Daversa (Institute of Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK) Short-listed for

 Access to Understanding

2013 Most people may not think very much about reasons explaining the shape of our feet. For evolutionary biologists and designers of prosthetic legs however, this topic is of major interest.

How heels help people walk

To start, I should say that all at Europe PMC support Open Access. This is just a short list of some issues that can be frustrating…   1.    The often incorrect definition of green and gold routes to Open Access I am a relative newcomer to Open Access having only been working in this area for a couple of years.

5 annoying things about Open Access

We’re delighted that 4 new funders have joined Europe PMC, bringing the total to 24! The new funders are:  Worldwide Cancer Research (formerly AICR), who fund research into the causes of cancer. The AICR is UK-based, but funds projects all around the world, supporting the best scientists wherever they are.

New funders join Europe PMC

Europe PMC is delighted to be involved with

 “I’ve got nothing to lose by trying it”



– a guide by charity Sense about Science and partners that enables non-specialists to evaluate claims about treatments for medical conditions. Online adverts and chat-room conversations testify to the ‘incredible’ benefits of new medicines and treatments selling the empty promise of curing the incurable.

How to weigh up claims about cures and treatments

[[Science Engagement Intern – Europe PubMed Central]{style=“font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}]{style=“font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;”}

[ [ ]{style=“font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}]{style=“font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”}

 [[Salary is £16,049 per annum, pro rata for the

Science Engagement Internship available

Europe PMC is pleased to offer researchers the ability to link articles to an ORCID. The tool can also be found under the ‘Resources’ menu on the Europe PMC home page. In this interface you can link any of the 28 million works available in Europe PMC to your ORCID. Adding articles to your ORCID is a simple two-step process:

Linking Articles Available in Europe PMC to your ORCID

I have just been to the BioBricks Fondation SB6.0 conference, an international Synthetic Biology conference, this year hosted in the UK at Imperial College London.

Why do we need &#8216;another&#8217; PubMed?

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.

Access to Understanding competition winners announced

I attended the UCL Neuroscience Symposium on Friday, an event showcasing work being carried out by scientists at UCL and its partners in to all areas of Neuroscience – from Developmental Neuroscience to Disorders of the Nervous System, and a lot in between!

Why should I use Europe PMC – isn’t it just about European research?

There is a new prototype tool available for browsing on Europe PMC labs: Acromine. Developed and hosted by the National Centre for Textmining, University of Manchester, Acromine suggests expansions of acronyms and presents articles specific to those expansions. The new tool is presented on an interface similar to the look and feel of Europe PMC.

Acromine: a new tool is featured on Europe PMC labs

Europe PMC has released a new GRant Information SysTem (GRIST) that is loaded with grant data from the 20 Europe PMC funders. It includes all of the data provided by the Funders from the beginning of the UKPMC service (which was rebranded to Europe PMC during 2012). This equates to 44,000 grant records relating to nearly 19,500 principal investigators (PIs). GRIST is built by Mimas, University of Manchester.

New route to access grant data

The  Wellcome Trust has joined with the Public Library of Science and Google  to launch the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) to recognise the use of scientific research, published through open access, that has led to innovations in any field that benefit society.This new, innovative programme recognises individuals who have used, applied or remixed scientific research – published through open access –  to innovate and make a difference

Wellcome Trust supports open access award programme

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 anyone outside of that specialism, but it exists for a reason.

The Importance of Jargon

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.

My reflections on the Access to Understanding competition

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.

Institutional and Subject-Specific Repositories: Responding to HEFCE’s Call for Advice on 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.

Why I entered the Access to Understanding competition

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.

A RESTful Web Service for Europe PubMed Central

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

CC-BY: which publishers offer this license?

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.

UKPMC becomes Europe PubMed Central

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.

eLife &#8211; first articles now online

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 of open access content had grown to 33% in 2009.

Increasing proportion of UKPMC articles are open access

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.

Search using vernacular journal titles

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 growth.

Reactions to the Finch report on expanding access

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 ‘prohibitive’ journal costs Times Higher Education 28 April 2012

April deluge

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.

SpringerPlus &#8212; new OA journal from Springer

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 Editorial Board.

Open Biology &#8211; a new open access journal

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.

European Bioinformatics Institute to lead UK PubMed Central

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 who can demonstrate excellence in a variety of technical skills.

UK PubMed Central is hiring!

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.

Mark Patterson named Managing Executive Editor of new open access journal

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.

The Open Access Interviews

Project Manager for UKPMC We are looking to recruit an  experienced Project Manager to join the Literature Services Team at the  European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) located on the Wellcome Trust  Genome Campus near Cambridge in the UK. The  Project Manager will be responsible for coordinating UK PubMed Central  (UKPMC), a repository of 2 million full text  biomedical research articles, supplemented with over 25 million  abstracts, database

UKPMC is hiring!

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 of PhD theses and clinical guidelines, as well as a range of research reports.

UKPMC &#8212; now with links to records held in the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) databases

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.

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.

UKPMC Engagement Manager vacancy

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, and all content will be archived in PubMed Central.

Scientific Reports: a new open access journal from NPG

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.

Leading research organisations announce top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences

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.

The Power of Text Mining

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.

Open Biology: an open access journal from the Royal Society

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.

UK PubMed Central report from NIHR &#8216;trainee&#8217; meeting

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 model — either through a hybrid or full open access option – was $2,367.

Wellcome Trust and the author-pays model

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.

NPG announce plans to launch a fully Open Access journal

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.

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.

Eugenics Review : digitised and freely available through UKPMC

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 article directly into their Zotero Library.

UKPMC is Zotero-enabled

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 high rejection rate.

Europe PMC News Blog

Prepare for the new Europe PMC plus

‘Let me count the ways.’