The British Journal of Cancer – owned by Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) – has chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for articles published under the BJC OPEN initiative. This licence permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop on the 24th Spetember, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. The workshop was split into two sessions.

The first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference took place in Lund between the 14-16th September 2009. The full set of presentations will be made available from the conference site within the next week or so. Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, spoke about the Trust’s open access policy, grantee compliance with the OA mandate, and what steps needed to be taken to achieve full OA for all Trust funded research papers.

The full archive (1947 to date) of the British Journal of Cancer -published by NPG on behalf of Cancer Research UK – is now available in UKPMC. Current content is embargoed for 12 months, though articles routed through BJC Open are made available at the time of publication. The archive was digitised through the Wellcome Trust/JISC/NLM Medical Journals Backfiles Project.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). “PMC Canada is a powerful tool that will help researchers build upon one another’s work and speed up the discovery and innovation process to address important

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) – publishers of journals such as Cancer Research and Molecular Cancer Research – have announced the launch of their manuscript deposition service.

UK PubMed Central development partners at the British Library invite life sciences researchers to take part in a short survey on images (takes no more than five minutes). The British Library project team, which manages development activities for UKPMC, and is specifically tasked with identifying additional, hard to find content to add to UKPMC, is keen to understand what types of images researchers would find useful for potential inclusion in

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced the development of a licence that will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. “NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing David Hoole.

The American Society of Hematology – publishers of the journal Blood – have developed a Wellcome-compliant author-pays option. In return for a fee ($2000), ASH will deposit the final version of Wellcome-funded articles directly into PMC, where they will be made freely available at the time of publication.

The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (AJTMH) – published by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene – have clarified their author-pays option. For authors who select the OA option (at a cost of $2500) the journal office will deposit the final version directly in PubMed Central and it will be made freely available at the time of publication.

At a poster session at the Open Repositories Conference 2009, Peter Millington (Technical Development Officer st Sherpa) presented data on the number of publishers/journals used by Wellcome-funded authors that offered a Wellcome-compliant OA publishing policy. Taking a cohort of 3766 papers published in 901 different journals, Millington shows that potential compliance increased from 70% in 2006 to 87% in 2009.