Open Access Week 2009

This week is Open Access Week 2009. The aim of which is to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access – the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication.

As such, we thought we’d take the opportunity to flag up United Kingdom PubMed Central (UKPMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the US National Institutes of Health free digital archive, UKPMC provides a stable and permanent online archive of full-text peer reviewed research publications.

Titles freely available through UKPMC include Medical History, British Medical Journal, Journal of Anatomy, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (which we’ve previously posted about).

For a more in-depth guide to UKPMC and other free web resources, see ‘Free for All: History of Medicine on the Web‘, one of the Wellcome Library’s Workshops.

(Image above from the British Medical Journal, 26th January 1889, from a report describing a patient with an artificial cheek and eye).