Competition in open access publishing is increasing with the launch of two similarly named online open-access journals. Open Biology (Royal Society Publishing) will start receiving submissions this July whilst Biology Open (BiO; The Company of Biologists), discussed in the previous post, is set to launch in the autumn of 2011.

The Company of Biologists has announced BIOLOGY OPEN (BiO), a new online only, Open Access journal publishing original research across all aspects of the biological sciences including cell science, developmental biology and experimental biology. Launching in Autumn 2011, BiO aims to “ provide rapid publication for peer reviewed, scientifically sound observations and valid conclusions in these allied fields.

The American Association of Immunologists, publisher of The Journal of Immunology, have launched a new, free service to authors, to deposit selected manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC).  Articles deposited in PMC are automatically mirrored to UKPMC.

Analysis of the content in UKPMC shows an increasing proportion of articles are fully open access and thus can be downloaded, and re-used, typically for non-commercial purposes.  To be clear, all content in UKPMC can be accessed without any restriction, but only a subset of this content is fully open access. In 2001, just 7% of the articles published in that year and added to UKPMC, were defined as “open access”.

A report published today looking at how to improve access to academic literature suggests that open access is likely to have the greatest benefits to the UK scholarly communications system. Open access, whereby research outputs are made freely accessible to the widest possible audience, is an issue to which the Wellcome Trust is firmly committed. The Trust provides funding to its researchers to cover open access publishing costs.

BMJ Open – BMJ’s new online-only, open access journal – has been launched.

A presentation by Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) given at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries that looks at the Wellcome Trust experience with the author-pays, open access model. Looking at Wellcome-funded papers published in the quarter of 2010, Kiley calculates that the average cost of papers published under the author-pays model — either through a hybrid or full open access option – was $2,367.

Wiley have announced the launch of Wiley Open Access, a new publishing programme of open access journals.  The first three titles – Microbiology Open, Brain and Behavior and Ecology and Evolution – will all launch later in 2011.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced that they will be launching a fully open access journal  – Scientific Reports – in July 2011. Funded entirely through article process charges ($1350 per published article), Scientific Reports will publish “ original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. UKPMC is now “Zotero enabled”, which means that users can store the bibliographic details of any UKPMC article directly into their Zotero Library.

The complete archive of the Eugenics Review journal – from 1909 through to 1968 when the title ceased – has been digitised through the Wellcome Library’s Backfile Digitisation Project, and is now freely available at UKPMC and PubMed Central.