Most biomedical research in the United Kingdom will be made freely available online in a database that went live this month and which is supported by nine of the UK's biggest research sponsors.
UK PubMed Central (UKPMC; www.ukpmc.ac.uk) mirrors the US PubMed Central database, a free online archive of life science research administered by the US National Institutes of Health. Many of the groups behind the UK initiative, which has been led by the Wellcome Trust, now require that the results of research they support are made available to the site once they are accepted for publication by a peer reviewed journal.
The Wellcome Trust announced in May 2005 that it was looking for technical partners to set up the service (BMJ 2005;330:1043). The trust, together with the other eight research funders that support the project, awarded the contract to develop the site to a partnership between the British Library, the University of Manchester, and the European Bioinformatics Institute last July.
Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, said, “Medical research is not complete until the results have been communicated. The development of UKPMC provides a great opportunity for this research to be made freely available, and I am very pleased that a first class partnership … will be running it.
“This is only the start, however, and over the next few years the challenge will be to develop UKPMC so that it becomes the destination site of choice for the international biomedical research community and all those who are interested in discovering the results of groundbreaking research first hand.”
The research funders that support the database comprise the Arthritis Research Campaign; the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council; the British Heart Foundation; Cancer Research UK; the Association of Medical Research Charities; the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department; the Department of Health; the Joint Information Systems Committee; the Medical Research Council; and the Wellcome Trust.
A spokesman for BioMed Central, a publisher of peer reviewed open access journals, said, “The launch of UK PubMed Central is a significant development in the movement to make research more freely and easily accessible. By [guaranteeing that] researchers make their papers freely available on UKPMC, funding agencies are ensuring the broadest possible dissemination of scientific findings from research they fund, further contributing to developments in the scientific community that will accelerate scientific discovery.”
All articles published in BioMed Central's journals would automatically be uploaded to the repository, it said, eliminating the need for researchers to upload their research manually themselves.
Research articles in the BMJ, already automatically loaded on to PubMed Central on publication, will now also be available on UKPMC.