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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 you click on the count, this will display the citing articles, which themselves can be sorted by citation count.

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.

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.

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.

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.