British Library-led partnership to run online research archive

31 July 2006

Scientists will be able to access a vast collection of biomedical research at the touch of a button thanks to a major new initiative that aims to promote the free transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery. Based on a model currently used in the United States, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.

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

Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, said: "Medical research is not complete until the results have been communicated.I am delighted that such a strong consortium has been appointed to run UK PubMed Central. This is a partnership with the National Library of Medicine in the United States and will provide the best repository of the biomedical research literature in the world."

UKPMC will ensure that the digital archive of published articles resulting from research paid for by any of the funding consortium will be freely available, fully searchable and extensively linked to other online resources.

Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Programmes at the British Library, said: "The British Library is delighted to have been chosen to set up and manage UK PubMed Central. Along with our partners, we anticipate that it will offer a sophisticated and exciting new means of scholarly communication for biomedical researchers.

"Building on the complementary strengths that each partner brings to this project, we expect to create a platform for the development of a whole range of new services for the UK and European biomedical research community."

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 – on servers based at MIMAS (Manchester Information and Associated Services) – 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.

Professor Stephen Oliver, of The University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, said: "The availability of complete genome sequences has revolutionised the biomedical sciences and The University of Manchester has been in the vanguard of this revolution since its inception.

"There has been an explosive growth in both the number of biomedical publications and the size of their accompanying data sets; UKPMC will become a major tool to allow both the research community and the public to access and analyse this information.

"Manchester's expertise in bioinformatics and the provision of on-line bibliographic services will be harnessed towards this end. We have a long history of collaboration with the British Library and the European Bioinformatics Institute in both research and service provision, and we look forward to working with these partners to make UKPMC an integral part of the national research scene."

Peter Stoehr, Head of IT Services at EBI, added: "We are excited about working with our partners to improve global access to the biomedical literature. This fits perfectly with EBI's service mission, to provide freely available data and bioinformatics services to all facets of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress; we are looking forward to creating new ways to mine this information and to link it to underlying biological databases."

UK PubMed Central will provide an enhanced way of accessing published research, preserving it for posterity and making it richly searchable in ways that are not currently available.

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. Launch of the service is scheduled for January 2007.

The UKPMC Funders Group consists of: the Arthritis Research Campaign; the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council; the British Heart Foundation; Cancer Research UK; the Association of Medical Research Charities; Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department; the Department of Health; the Joint Information Systems Committee; the Medical Research Council; the Wellcome Trust.

Contacts

Katrina Nevin-Ridley
Wellcome Trust
T +44 (0)20 7611 8540
E k.nevin-ridley@wellcome.ac.uk

Ben Sanderson
British Library
T +44 (0)1937 546126/+44 (0)20 7412 711
E ben.sanderson@bl.uk

Cath Brooksbank/Anna-Lynn Wegener
EMBL-EBI
T +44 (0)1223 492525/+49 6221 3878452

E cath@ebi.ac.uk/ wegener@embl.de

Aeron Haworth
Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester
T +44 (0)161 275 8383
E: aeron.haworth@manchester.ac.uk

Notes for editors

1. Access PubMed Central online.

2. The Wellcome Trust is the most diverse biomedical research charity in the world, spending about £450 million every year both in the UK and internationally to support and promote research that will improve the health of humans and animals. The Trust was established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, and is funded from a private endowment, which is managed with long-term stability and growth in mind.

3. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BCE, right up to today's newspapers.

4. The University of Manchester is Britain's largest single-site university with a proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. It boasts 36 000 students, 4500 academic and research staff, and 500 degree courses. The University has an exceptional record of generating and sharing new ideas and innovations and is one of the world's top centres for biomedical research. Manchester's total expenditure on research in 2003/4 was £269.5 million, which has led to a quality, breadth and volume of research activity unparalleled in the UK, as demonstrated by the results of the independent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

5. Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) is a national data centre run by Manchester Computing as The University of Manchester, providing the UK and international education and research community with networked access to key data and information resources to support teaching, learning and research across a wide range of disciplines.

6. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). EBI grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Macromolecular Structure Database), data from microarray experiments (ArrayExpress), protein–protein interactions (IntAct), pathway information (Reactome) and the biomedical literature (CiteXplore). EBI hosts several research groups and its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.

7. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is a basic research institute funded by public research monies from 19 member states (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). Research at EMBL is conducted by approximately 80 independent groups covering the spectrum of molecular biology. EMBL has five units: the main laboratory in Heidelberg, and outstations in Hinxton (the European Bioinformatics Institute), Grenoble, Hamburg, and Monterotondo near Rome. The cornerstones of EMBL's mission are: to perform basic research in molecular biology; to train scientists, students and visitors at all levels; to offer vital services to scientists in the member states; to develop new instruments and methods in the life sciences; to actively engage in technology transfer activities. EMBL's International PhD Programme has a student body of about 170. The Laboratory also sponsors an active Science and Society programme. Visitors from the press and public are welcome.