The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) recently announced two new tools, one ready for use, one still in beta. Both seek to enhance the PubMed Central (PMC) user experience. PMC is a a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature hosted by the NLM.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has developed a new presentation style called PubReader, an easier way to use your Web browser to read articles in PMC on your desktop, laptop, or tablet computer. PubReader breaks an article into multiple columns and pages to improve readability and navigation. It can expand a page to whatever fits on your screen — with multiple columns on a desktop monitor or a single column page on a small tablet.

Open-i is a project that “aims to provide next generation information retrieval services for biomedical articles from the full text collections.”  Although still in beta, this Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine lets users retrieve not only the MEDLINE citation information, but also the outcome statements in the article and the most relevant figure from it. You can now examine the initial 600,000 images from PubMed Central, view your results as a citation list or as an image grid, and search with words or query by image.