What exactly is Europe PMC? How is it different from PubMed Central? What can I do with Europe PMC? Those are some of the questions I had myself when I first heard of Europe PMC. And now my task is to make sure that everyone can answer them easily.

Manual curation is vital for maintaining quality information in biological databases. However, with the exponential growth in biological data this approach is both challenging and time consuming. We wanted to create a scalable and sustainable process which could complement manual curation.

We’re delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Sciences has joined Europe PMC as a new funder, bringing the total funders to 27. The Academy of Medical Sciences represents the diverse spectrum of medical science – from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery.

Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr. Our search has been using a Lucene-based index and customised query handler for several years.

We’ve recently launched a re-designed Grant Finder on Europe PMC. You can use the Grant Finder to search over 56,700 biomedical research grants, awarded to the 23,000 Principal Investigators supported by the 26 Europe PMC funders.

Since our blog post last summer on the inclusion of Wikipedia as an external links provider, we have been lucky to host an intern, Tom Arrow,  who has spent the last few months investigating possible further connections between Wikimedia projects and Europe PMC.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time.

You may notice that the Europe PMC website looks a little different. Perhaps a little clearer, neater, bolder? More importantly, we also hope that it is easier to use and to find key information about Europe PMC. Yes: we have given the Europe PMC website a makeover to celebrate the New Year!

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.