A major initiative that aims to promote the free transfer of ideas via an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences was launched this week.
UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), based on a US model, will provide free access to the archive and, it is hoped, help to speed up scientific discovery.
The contract to run UK PubMed Central 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, which is part of a nine-strong group of UK research funders, 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. UKPMC 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: "Along with our partners, we anticipate that it [UKPMC] 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: "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.”
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.
Link
PubMed Central (US)