I have just been to the BioBricks Fondation SB6.0 conference, an international Synthetic Biology conference, this year hosted in the UK at Imperial College London.

Imagine, if you will, open access as a train, running up and down the length of the country, travelling anywhere track is laid, delivering papers, books, ideas to all and sundry. Research funders have the opportunity to man the signal boxes and set the open access movement’s direction of travel.

I attended the UCL Neuroscience Symposium on Friday, an event showcasing work being carried out by scientists at UCL and its partners in to all areas of Neuroscience – from Developmental Neuroscience to Disorders of the Nervous System, and a lot in between!

Europe PMC has released a new GRant Information SysTem (GRIST) that is loaded with grant data from the 20 Europe PMC funders. It includes all of the data provided by the Funders from the beginning of the UKPMC service (which was rebranded to Europe PMC during 2012). This equates to 44,000 grant records relating to nearly 19,500 principal investigators (PIs). GRIST is built by Mimas, University of Manchester.

There is a new prototype tool available for browsing on Europe PMC labs: Acromine. Developed and hosted by the National Centre for Textmining, University of Manchester, Acromine suggests expansions of acronyms and presents articles specific to those expansions. The new tool is presented on an interface similar to the look and feel of Europe PMC.

The Wellcome Trust has joined with the Public Library of Science and Google to launch the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) to recognise the use of scientific research, published through open access, that has led to innovations in any field that benefit society.This new, innovative programme recognises individuals who have used, applied or remixed scientific research – published through open access – to innovate and make a difference

On May 1st 2013 Yorkshire Cancer Research (YCR) became the newest member of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group, and we’re delighted to have them on board. YCR fund cancer research that is carried out by world-class scientists and clinicians across Yorkshire, and provide information to help local people beat cancer.

by Ian Le Guillou, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge Although contradictory to the hopes of the Access to Understanding competition, writing about the work described in ‘NLK is a Novel Therapeutic Target for PTEN Deficient Tumour Cells‘ made me realise the importance of scientific jargon. Yes, it makes research very difficult to understand for anyone outside of that specialism, but it exists for a reason.

By Claire Sand, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London The Access to Understanding competition had instant appeal for me because it seemed to combine my two greatest interests – science and writing.

Earlier this month HEFCE invited advice on developing their open access policy in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Both EMBL-EBI, who run the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) service, and the UK members of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group, strongly support HEFCE’s movement towards requiring that all outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF are published open access.

By Emma Pewsey, Department of Materials Science, University of Cambridge. I’m a relative newcomer to biosciences – at school, physics and chemistry were more my thing. However, starting a PhD on the corrosion of metal implants in the human body meant I needed to brush up on my biology. It was time to hit the medical journals. It was easy enough to find papers. However, it was much harder to determine whether they were relevant.