UK PubMed Central improves access to free online life sciences resource
13 January 2010
Today saw the launch of the open beta version of UKPMC, with a whole range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge held by the repository. It will enable researchers to search and link information from literature and drill down into underlying datasets in new and innovative ways.
Supported by the UK's eight principal funders of biomedical and health research - who collectively award over 90 per cent of the UK's research grants in biomedicine and health - UKPMC offers users a comprehensive and sustainable repository for UK funded free-to-access life sciences research. The resource was developed in collaboration with the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), who founded PubMed Central in the USA, the consolidation of published research outputs into globally accessible resources such as UKPMC is considered vital for widening access to knowledge and improving the efficiency of desk research. It will also vastly improve the ability of funding organisations to assess the impact of their research, and help to better inform scientific strategy and policy making.
The easy-to-use, intuitive interface developed by the British Library for the latest open beta version will enable researchers to:
- conduct a full-text search of 1.7 million articles
- access abstracts for over 19 million articles
- exploit the scientific literature with innovative features that enrich abstracts and full-text articles by linking scientific terms to other sources of quality-assured and useful information
- search content not included in traditional journal literature - including clinical guidelines as well as other hard-to-find material such as PhD theses.
Professor Dame Sally Davies, Director General of Research and Development at the UK Department of Health, said: "I am delighted that UK PubMed Central is ready to launch new features on its website. This technology will make it possible to discover and use hidden 'gems' of information buried in the documents within UK PubMed Central. The Funders' commitment to Open Access, and to making research outputs available through UK PubMed Central, means this advance will increase the knowledge base and allow research to realise even greater health and economic benefits for this country."
Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Trust, said: "These new developments demonstrate a real commitment to improving the research process - not only by offering the researcher one single point of access to a vast amount of relevant material but also through using 'intelligent' data-mining tools to provide users with an at-a-glance summary of an article's key biological concepts."
About UKPMC
UK PubMed Central is a UK initiative of PubMed Central, the free archive of life sciences journals developed by the National Institutes of Health National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). NCBI is based at the National Library of Medicine in the USA.
UK PubMed Central's mission is to become the information resource of choice for the UK biomedical and health research community by:
- establishing and expanding a single sustainable repository for UK-funded research outputs
- developing innovative tools to enable better and more effective use of the existing content
- providing access to additional content that integrates seamlessly into the UK PubMed Central website
- creating comprehensive analysis and reporting tools for researchers and funders to inform strategy and policy making.
UK PubMed Central is supported with funding from the Arthritis Research Campaign, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates, the Department of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
The development partners for UK PubMed Central are the British Library, Mimas and NaCTeM (National Centre for Text Mining) at the University of Manchester, and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
