UK PubMed Central (UKPMC)

If you’re a working scientist, unless you’ve been hiding under a stone (and entirely self-funded) for the past decade, you can’t have failed to notice the stir about publishing in open access journals. There are lots of reasons, but perhaps the best illustration was given by Robert Terry in an article titled “Funding the Way to Open Access” published in PLoS Biology in March 2005:

Imagine this scenario. You’re the director of one of the world’s largest medical research charities, and you receive notification from one of your funded investigators in Africa reporting some exciting progress toward the development of a vaccine for malaria. The work has just been published, so you log onto the Web to do a quick keyword search, and a link to the article is brought up on your screen. Then imagine the frustration when you click on the link to read the message, “Access Denied—access to this journal is restricted to registered institutional and individual subscribers.”

Well now it’s happened. UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) is scheduled to go live in January 2007. The first phase of implementation will simply mirror the American PubMed Central database, later going on to add additional UK resources.

The major research funders have already adopted policies which require publication in an open access journal, so publishers are over a barrel - sign up or sign out. It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for them. After a decade of handwringing, continuously rising subscription costs but apparent inability to respond to the interweb, maybe they got what was coming to them.