UK PubMed goes beyond journals

Best known as an access gateway to biomedical research journals, the UK incarnation of the PubMed Central website is to introduce access to additional types of content, such as clinical guidelines, and mining and linking facilities.

There will also be direct links to the 18 million records on the US version of PubMed.

Eight funding organisations have thrown their weight behind the development of the site.

The British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) are working together to develop UKPMC.

Richard Boulderstone, British Library director of strategy, said: “UKPMC is increasingly important to the UK research community because it is an open collection of peer-reviewed articles funded by primary biomedical researchers.”

The British Library is providing access to additional content as a pilot project. Lee-Ann Coleman, head of STM information at the British Library, said: “Researchers benefit from having access to content such as clinical guidelines, clinical trials data, images, patents and PhD theses through the Ethos service.”

But providing access to research data is proving a thorny issue, according to Coleman. “Data is not easy to find. There does need to be some co-ordination and management, and we are thinking about what to do in this area.”

The UKPMC team is hoping to have a new search interface demo ready this year. It is expecting to make access to additional content available in a year, and text mining and data facilities in two or three years.