The Wellcome Trust, as part of a nine-strong group of UK research funders, announced today that the contract to run UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) has been awarded to a partnership between the British Library, The University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

Based on a model currently used in the United States, UKPMC will provide free online access to the digital archive of published articles resulting from research paid for by any of the funding consortium. It will be fully searchable and extensively linked to other online resources.

In the initial stages of the UKPMC programme, the British Library will lead on setting up the service, developing the process for handling author submissions and marketing 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 (EMBL), will contribute its biomedical domain knowledge and state-of-the-art text-mining tools to integrate the research literature with the underlying bioinformatics databases.

Launch of the service is scheduled for January 2007.

See also

• Press release (full details)