UK PubMed Central To Launch in January

-- Library Journal, 08/09/2006

The desire to make government funded research freely available to the public got another boost with the announced launch of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), a repository based on the PubMed Central in the United States, operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Like its American counterpart, UKPMC will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. Officials at the Wellcome Trust, strong advocates of open access, said the contract to run UKPMC was awarded to a partnership between the British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Launch of the service is scheduled for January 2007.

Under the plan, the British Library will set up the initial service, develop the process for handling author submissions, and market the resource to the research community. The University of Manchester will host the service and will support "the process of engaging with higher-education users." EBI, which is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, will contribute biomedical domain knowledge and text-mining tools. British library officials said the first phase of the implementation will involve mirroring the American PubMed Central database. The partners will then establish the technical infrastructure of the service, including the facility for ingesting articles, and will also begin to engage more widely with the user communities.