The World Health Organization (WHO) will become a member of the open access repository Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC), joining 25 other life sciences and biomedical research funders. The announcement is in preparation for the launch of the WHO open access policy on July 1, 2014.
Europe PMC provides free access to nearly 3 million full-text biomedical research articles, over 23 million abstracts from PubMed and 4 million biological and patent records. This content is discoverable via an integrated full-text and abstract search, and includes citation information and links to research databases.
Europe PMC is managed and developed by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on behalf of Europe PMC's funders. Since 2006, Europe PMC has grown from being a simple mirror of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information's PubMed Central database to being a standalone site, providing critical infrastructure for European funders who require open access for their research outputs.
The decision of WHO to join the expanded Europe PMC resource comes at a time when providing free access to research output continues to be championed at the highest levels within the UK and Europe. Europe PMC is playing a vital role in realising these ambitions.
