Access to Understanding is a new science-writing competition, developed by Europe PubMed Central and The British Library, aimed at early career researchers and PhD students.  The winner will receive an iPad and have their entry published in eLife.

We are delighted to launch Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC), which reflects a growing commitment from European Life Sciences research funders to make their research freely available around the world. As announced in July, the European Research Council (ERC) becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and the Austrian Research Fund.

eLife [, the new open-access journal for outstanding scientific advancements, has ]{style=“font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}published[ its first four research articles.]{style=“font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”} [ ]{style=“font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”} [First announced in summer 2011, eLife is a researcher-led initiative for the best in science and science communication.

Have you ever wanted a JBC article and been irritated by the need to type ‘Journal of Biological Chemistry’ into your literature search engine? Have you ever struggled to remember what ‘PNAS’ stands for? – ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’ in case you wanted to know! The new vernacular journal title search feature in UK PubMed Central solves both of these problems.

[The European Research Council (ERC) announced today that it will participate in the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) open access repository service, joining 18 existing UK and European funders[[i]]{style=“font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;”}.The ERC becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and the Austrian Research Fund.

[A Web Service of UKPMC content has been released, and is available via the following link: ]{style=“font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;”}[http://europepmc.org/SoapWebServices ]{style=“color: blue;

[The report of the Working Group chaired by Dame Janet Finch about Expanding Access to Published Research Findings has been published. This recommends a programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research. Better, faster communication of research results will bring benefits for public services and for economic growth.

[[A previous ]{style=“color: #333333; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;”}[[post]{style=“mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;”}]{style=“font-family: "trebuchet ms" , "sans-serif";”}[ on this ]{style=“color: #333333;

[Last month, the wettest April in the UK since records began, there was also a deluge of articles in the popular press about open access.]{style=“font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}   [This is a round-up of some of the articles (and perhaps notable by their absence are any articles that are behind a paywall!). ]{style=“font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;”}

[Are you interested in finding highly cited articles? If so then the new features in UKPMC will be of value to you. Search results can now be sorted by the number of times articles have been cited.]{style=“font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;”} [Each search result is now shown with a count of the number of articles citing that record.