For Open Access week 2015, we tweeted some number-related facts about Europe PMC, reproduced with a little additional context here.

Europe PMC Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life sciences, healthcare and medical humanities. It includes full text reports from government agencies, like the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the US’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and content allowed by participating publishers.

Title quote from ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, Sonnet 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Our relationship with ORCID personal identifiers blooms in a number of ways: ORCID Wizard Europe PMC was an early adopter of ORCIDs allowing researchers the ability to link articles to an ORCID using our easy-to-use article claiming Wizard.

“Education doesn’t make you happy. And what is freedom? We don’t become happy just because we are free, if we are. Or because we have been educated, if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears. Tells use where delights are lurking. Convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever: that of the mind.

Europe PMC has a new provider of External Links: links from articles on Europe PMC to related content on 3 ^rd party websites. Our most recent addition provides links from over 300,000 articles to entries in Wikipedia: the free encyclopaedia.

Peer review is the cornerstone of how we decide what research to publish. As currently implemented, it generally consists of two or three referees giving anonymous comments on a research article prior to publication … or … rejection.

We’re delighted that 2 new funders have joined Europe PMC, bringing the total to 28! The new funders are: Alzheimer’s Society is a membership organisation, which works to improve the quality of life of people affected by dementia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

With the Access to Understanding awards ceremony just about wrapping up, we can now announce the winners… First place was awarded to Philippa Matthews for her entry ‘Rolling back malaria: A journey through space and time’, which described research exploring the changing patterns of malaria risk across Africa. The piece was praised by our judges for its enthusiasm, clear writing style, and sense of narrative;

We are excited to announce voting has now opened for Access to Understanding’s People’s Choice Award! The People’s Choice Award is an important part of the competition – since the entries are written for the public, we think they should be judged by the public. Click here or on the image below to read and vote for one of the 12 shortlisted entries.

More than 300 Cochrane Systematic Reviews, funded under the 2007 and 2010 UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grant programmes, are available on Europe PMC. This has been a collaborative project between Cochrane, Wiley, and the Europe PMC team, and has enabled us to make this subset of full-text reviews available to access for free via Europe PMC with the functionality that papers in Europe PMC enjoy.

Access to Understanding is getting bigger and better every year. The 2015 science-writing competition attracted over 300 entries from all over the world. But don’t take my word for it, explore the map below to see where they came from and what they were about. Globalised Science With 227 submissions, the lion’s share of entries were from the UK. But that’s not the whole story.