UK PubMed Central is launched

The UK version of the US National Institutes of Health’s open-access biomedical research archive has now been launched. UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.

UKPMC was developed through a partnership between the British Library, The University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Initially, UKPMC mirrors the American PubMed Central database (hosted by the NCBI at NIH) but it is expected to grow into a unique online resource representing the UK’s biomedical research output.

The British Library runs the service and promotes it to researchers, as well as offering support for those who want to include their research papers in UKPMC. The University of Manchester hosts the service and will support the process of engaging with higher education users.

EBI, which is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), is contributing its biomedical knowledge and text-mining tools to integrate the research literature with underlying bioinformatics databases.