UK PubMedCentral, a UK mirror of PMC and a growing project at the British Library is soliciting responses to a survey:

Dear Colleague,

As you will know, UKPMC provides free access to an extensive repository of biomedical research literature, as well as an easy way for researchers to submit newly published work to meet the UKPMC Funders Group members’ Open Access requirements. The vision is for UKPMC to be much more than that!

As we enter the next stage of developing UKPMC into an innovative and useful resource for UK researchers we want to ensure that your needs and ideas are heard and incorporated at the outset. Please help us by completing our online questionnaire.

It should only take a few minutes and, as our way of saying thank you, all respondents will be entered into a prize draw to win an all-expenses paid weekend for two in London.

Click here to be taken straight to the survey page:

http://www.bl.uk/surveys/ukpmc/ukpmc.htm

Much of the survey asks questions about what additional tools you use for scientific search etc and what features you would like to see in UK PMC. This worries me as it seems like duplication both of effort and the creation of yet another del.icio.us/Facebook/Google/whatever for scientists. We don’t need another one, we need integration between the existing ones and improvement of user interfaces, interoperability, and useability. This wonderful video on the data portability initiative, which I saw featured on Deepak’s blog, tells the story. That’s my view anyway. Feel free to take the survey and disagree with me!

In addition the UK Biochemical Society has also commissioned some research and is looking for people to fill out another survey;

The Biochemical Society, in collaboration with other members of the Biosciences Federation (www.bsf.ac.uk), is conducting research into your experience of Open Access; I am writing to ask you to participate in this, by completing a brief questionnaire that should take no longer than 15 minutes.

The survey can be found here and the deadline is 1 February.