The announcement that the Journal of Visualized Experiments – JoVE – has moved from an open access model, to a subscription-based model, has attracted much comment in the blogosphere, as can be seen from the postings at the Nature Network, and the Scholarly Kitchen blogs. As a consequence of moving to a subscription service, content from JoVE at PMC and UKPMC is now embargoed for two years.

UK PubMed Central is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKPubMedCentral – for now just tweeting blog posts and links to UKPMC Funders’ Group-funded articles as they become available in UKPMC.

A learned society has offered the Wellcome Trust an open access, author pays option for researchers who seek publication in their journal. However, the licence they wish to attach to these articles is more restrictive than the Trust would normally require when paying an OA fee.

The Research Information Network and Universities UK have produced a guide [PDF] to provide advice on paying open access publication charges. Recommendations are made for each of the key players involved in the scholarly communication chain – higher education institutions, publishers, funder and authors.

Papers published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) under their Open Choice option are now available in PMC and UKPMC. Currently around 110 papers – drawn from 20 ACS journal titles – are now freely available. These papers can be found by running the following search on UKPMC: ACS Author Choice [filter] All future papers published under this model will be made available through these repositories at the time of publication.

Users of the UK PubMed Central Manuscript Submission System (UKMSS) will soon be able to use a new service – ‘My UKPMC’ – to report on the outcomes of any grant funded by any one of the UKPMC Funders’ Group member organisations.

Each of the eight funders associated with UKPMC has a Funders Home Page from which you can find all papers in UKPMC which are associated with any of these funding bodies. In addition to be able to view these full-text articles, the article metadata can be exported in csv or xml. This metadata can also be sorted in various ways (author, title, date) and it is possible to limit the output to author manuscripts or publisher depositions.

As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list: 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent.