Paris

Busquin: encouraging E-BioSci partnership.

European Union research commissioner Philippe Busquin is backing plans by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) to establish a website called ‘E-Biosci’. This will be a European counterpart to PubMed Central, the free website for life-science papers to be launched this month by the US National Institutes of Health.

E-Biosci has Busquin's “full support”, he told Nature this week. “It may have important implications, not only for the way scientific information is spread and accessed worldwide, but also for the way business will be run in this sector in the near future,” he said.

An official from the European Commission's research directorate says the EC is open to paying part of the scheme's estimated US$3 million annual running costs. Although EMBO has agreed to pay 500,000 Euros ($511,000) to start E-Biosci, the project has no firm plans as yet for long-term funding.

The commission will be represented next week at a meeting convened by EMBO in a bid to take E-Biosci forward. Representatives of European research councils and the Wellcome Trust will also attend, along with major publishers including Nature, Oxford University Press and Elsevier Science.

EMBO has until now been the driving force behind E-Biosci. The meeting aims to promote wider involvement, to reach agreement on the structure of E-Biosci and to seek commitments from public research funders.

“The project's success will require a true partnership between all the actors concerned and I would be ready to give my full backing to such a partnership,” says Busquin.

The commission official says he hopes the meeting will result in the creation of a consortium to finalize and run E-Biosci, adding that such a consortium would be eligible for EU funding. “It is important that we have a credible alternative to PubMed Central, as without this we will be in a weak position to negotiate with the United States.”

The sum required to run E-Biosci is relatively small, he points out, and the commission is allowed to fund such ventures under ‘accompanying measures’ to the Framework research programme.