As of Wednesday 23rd June, the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) Open Beta site will go into full production mode, replacing the ‘Classic’ service available at http://ukpmc.ac.uk. Unveiled at a showcase event at the British Library earlier this year, the UKPMC Beta site provides users with a single point of access to: 1.8 million+ full text, peer reviewed published journal articles covering all fields of biomedical and health research (the UK PubMed

At a recent PubMed Central National Advisory Committe meeting, David Lipman (Director of NCBI) gave a presentation on the current status of PubMed Central which included the following data: Over 1.9 million articles are available in PMC. (Expected to hit 2 million by end of June ’10); Participating journals: 640 full participants; 220 that participate through the NIH Portfolio;

Karger Publishers have introduced an open access option, known as “Author’s Choice”. In return for a fee of CHF 3,000, Karger will make an article freely available (at the time of publication) through http://www.karger.com/ , as well as depositing the final version directly into PubMed Central. Articles routed through this mechanism are licenced under the Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-commercial licence.

The American Society for Microbiology have launched a full online only, open access journal, known as mBio. In an attempt to “break away from the current publication model”, mBio editors will “ either accept or reject manuscripts and will request only minor revisions; editors generally will not require authors to make extensive modifications or perform additional experiments.

The Royal Society has announced plans to develop a transparent pricing policy in which the subscription cost of its journals are linked to the uptake of author-pays, open access articles. “ From 2012 we shall implement a new and more transparent pricing policy in which the price of each journal is tied to the number of non-open access articles published in that journal and each journal will publish the relevant article counts annually.

Open Access can offer universities real cost saving benefits, claims Alma Swan in a report – ‘Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Univeresities’, published in February 2010 (download here: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/). Swan claims that the move to Open Access can ‘disrupt systems and processes that have been in place for a very long time’ (page i, Executive Summary) but the report makes it clear that it

Four European research funders have today added their support to the open access repository UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) by agreeing that the life sciences research outputs made possible with their funding are made freely available through this repository. Launched in January 2007, UKPMC is a free-to-access digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences research.

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop in September 2009, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to delegates, to identify the different barriers (and the most important of these) which prevent adherence to the mandates.

Maney Publishing have developed an author-pays option for around 40 of their journals, including 15 titles in the health sciences with the intention to expand this to humanities journals in the future.

The British Library have issued a press release to announce the launch of the new UK PubMed Central Open Beta website at beta.ukpmc.ac.uk: Helping researchers access and exploit over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers, on 12 January the British Library will showcase a whole range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge