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 announcedin July, the European Research Council (ERC) becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and the Austrian Research Fund. As a result of this participation, the 18 existing UK and European funders agreed that the UKPMC service should be rebranded as Europe PMC by 1 November 2012.
The service can now be found at the following URLs:
Europe PMC: http://europepmc.org
Europe PMC plus: http://plus.europepmc.org
(For managing grants and publications for Europe PMC funder-supported researchers).
Europe PMC labs: http://labs.europepmc.org
(For showcasing new developments based on the content of Europe PMC).
UKPMC was originally launched in January 2007, initially as a mirror of the US National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central (PMC), providing international preservation of open- and free-access biomedical literature. The UKPMC funders require that research papers funded by them must be made freely available via UKPMC no later than 6 months after publication.
In 2010, the service diversified from PMC and introduced additional contentincluding PubMed abstracts and biological patents, with innovations for navigation and search. Europe PMC now provides free access to:
- Over 2 million full text, peer-reviewed published journal articles
- Nearly 5 million biological and medical patents records
- More than 22 million PubMed abstracts
- Over 40,000 grants held by nearly 20,000 principal investigators allowing you to find out who is being funded, to do what, and for how much.
This content is discoverable via an integrated full text and abstract search that is free to all to use, wherever you are. You can also use Europe PMC to:
- See ‘cited by’ information for each article - you can now identify highly cited articles by using the citation sort tool.
- Streamline your information discovery by directly linking-out to gene, protein and chemical compound databases, including UniProt, PDB, and Entrez Gene.
- Stay up to date with new articles in your research area using the fully customisable RSS feeds.
A key aim of the rebrand to Europe PMC is to extend the repository further and encourage other European funders of life sciences research to make the outputs of the research they fund freely available through Europe PMC.
The decision of the ERC to join the expanded Europe PMC resource comes at a time when providing free access to research outputs is being championed at the highest levels within the UK and Europe. David Willets, the UK’s Science Minister, this year committed the UK government to the principle of providing “public access to publicly-funded research results”, whilst Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, stated“we need more timely access to scientific articles in Europe. We need Open Access to scientific information". Europe PMC is committed to playing a key role in realising these ambitions.
For the latest Europe PMC developments and more, follow us on Twitter: EuropePMC Updates