World Health Organization joins Europe PMC

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The World Health Organization (WHO) will become a member of the open-access repository Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC). The repository already includes 25 other life sciences and biomedical research funders as members. The announcement is said to have been made in preparation for the launch of the WHO policy on open access on 1 July 2014.

Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general of the WHO Health Systems and Innovation cluster, said: 'WHO is delighted to join Europe PubMed Central. WHO’s open-access policy is central to our commitment to universal access to information. Europe PMC will provide the platform for researchers to freely access and reuse WHO-authored and WHO-funded research, for the benefit of global health.'

Europe PMC provides free access to nearly three million full-text biomedical research articles, over 23 million abstracts from PubMed and 4 million biological and patent records. This content is discoverable via an integrated full-text and abstract search, and includes citation information and links to research databases.

Europe PMC is managed and developed by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on behalf of Europe PMC’s funders. Since 2006, Europe PMC has grown from being a simple mirror of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information’s PubMed Central database to being a standalone site, providing open access to European funders for their research outputs.