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| Hinxton, 31 July 2006 |
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| EMBL-EBI and collaborators win bid to run UK
PubMed Central
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Press
Release 31 July2006 [PDF]
UK to launch online research archive to further biomedical discovery
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. 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: "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 the EBI, added: "We are
excited about working with our partners to improve global
access to the biomedical literature. This fits perfectly with the
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 prosperity 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.
Press Contacts
Anna-Lynn Wegener
Press Officer
EMBL Heidelberg
Tel: +49 +6221 387-8452
Email: wegener@embl.de
Cath Brooksbanks
Scientific Outreach Officer
EMBL-EBI Hinxton
Tel: +44 1223 49- 2525
Email: cath@ebi.ac.uk |
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