The European Bioinformatics Institute has been awarded a five-year contract to run and lead the development of UK PubMed Central until 2016.
Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.
EBI will partner with the University of Manchester and the British Library to build a digital repository that helps researchers "make the best possible use of the scientific literature by building deep content links between articles and the underlying data,” Johanna McEntyre, head of literature services at EMBL-EBI, said in a statement.
“If we manage that, UKPMC will give people a chance to navigate the biomedical information space in an intuitive way,” she said.
UKPMC is now supported by 18 UK and European funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust. This is an increase from eight funding groups when the service launched in 2007.
Since then, UKPMC has grown from a mirror of the National Center for Biotechnology Information's PubMed Central to a standalone site that provides access to more than 2 million full-text biomedical research articles, over 25 million citations from PubMed and Agricola, patents from the European Patent Office, UK treatment guidelines, and biomedical PhD theses. More than 250,000 articles in the repository are published under open-access licenses.