The British Library has announced that it will showcase a range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge held by UK PubMed Central on January 12, 2010. Researchers will be able to access over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers.
Developed in consultation with researchers, UK Pub Med Central (UKPMC) aims to become the information resource of choice for the UK biomedical and health research community. Launched by Prof. Dame Sally C. Davies, Director General, Research and Development at the Department of Health, the Open Beta version of UKPMC will enable researchers to search and link information from literature and drill down into underlying datasets in new and innovative ways.
UKPMC is supported by the UK's eight principal funders of biomedical and health research, who fund over 90 percent of the country's research publications in the field. It seeks to offer users a comprehensive and sustainable repository for UK funded free-to-access life sciences research. Developed in collaboration with the founders of PubMed Central in the US, the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the consolidation of published research outputs into globally accessible resources such as UKPMC is seen to be vital for widening access to knowledge and improving the efficiency of desk research. It is also expected to vastly improve the ability of funding organisations to assess the impact of their research, and help to better inform scientific strategy and policy making.
The showcase event will provide the chance to try out some of the new features that have been developed by the British Library and the consortium of programme partners including European Bioinformatics Institute, Mimas at the University of Manchester and the National Centre for Text Mining. There will also be the opportunity to hear from some of the key funders behind the programme, including Prof. Doug Kell, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, on the value and importance of UKPMC for the research community.
The easy-to-use, intuitive interface developed by the British Library for the latest beta version is projected to enable researchers to conduct a full-text search of 1.7 million articles; access abstracts for over 19 million articles; exploit the scientific literature with innovative features which enrich abstracts and full-text articles by linking scientific terms to other sources of quality assured and useful information; and search content not included in traditional journal literature – including clinical guidelines as well as other hard to find material such as PhD theses.
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