The scientific literature often represents both the start and end point of a scientific project. With several thousand new life science research articles published every day, developing new ways to find papers of interest is an ongoing challenge. Placing the literature within the context of related public data resources is one way to help researchers in their data analysis, navigation and discovery. Here I will outline the relationship between journals and public databases in the life sciences before going on to describe the abstract and full-text literature databases available from EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The final part of the presentation will demonstrate how we are linking research articles to biological data resources through curated database links and text mining. All the literature described can be accessed via the UK PubMed Central website http://ukpmc.ac.uk/.