UK PubMed Central to become Europe PubMed Central - what you need to know

Day 5 of International Open Access Week 2012 is upon us, where has the week gone?  In the final of my blog posts about more general areas of the Open Access landscape in 2012, a little update on the changes to UKPMC coming soon.

For those in the Medical or Life Sciences, and those in the Humanities with a foot in one of these camps, PubMed Central (PMC), and in recent years UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), have become familiar entities. 

Initially set up as a place where National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researchers in the USA would be required to deposit research outputs.  It has expanded in recent times, with the advent of UKPMC for UK researchers with Wellcome Trust funding, to take in research outputs from a much broader cross-section of the research landscape; this is partly as a result of the emphasis on inter-displinary research, meaning that there are lots of research outputs out there with a relevance to a much wider community as a whole.

This is set to change again from 1st November 2012, with the re-naming of UKPMC to Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC).  This change comes in response to updated open access policies by the European Research Council, and its decision to use Europe PMC and ArXiv are its recommended repositories for the resultant research outputs. 

So, newly funded projects from ERC, and I guess those already underway, now have a slightly second-hand, dusted off and renamed, Europe PubMed Central repository into which to deposit these outputs.  Most researchers already depositing, or having deposited on their behalf, outputs from their funding to UKPMC, won't notice much difference in the way that they interact with EPMC.  UKPMC+ accounts for depositing papers remain the same, but the relevant URLs to which you'll need to go will change from 1st November.

Europe PMC becomes http://europepmc.org

Europe PMC Plus (for depositing content) becomes http://plus.europepmc.org

QM Researchers - did you know that not all publishers deposit your output into UKPMC for you unless you have paid the OA article processing charge?  Some publishers deposit on your behalf, the accepted version of the paper, and others the published version.  But in a few cases, you have to do this yourself, and it's not always obvious that this is the case.  So, if you are funded by Wellcome Trust or ERC, and want to be absolutely sure you are compliant with your funding, drop us an email and we'll be happy to help.