New Directories and File Packages for Bulk Retrieval of the PMC Article Datasets

[Story Updated April 1, 2022] PubMed Central (PMC) has made significant improvements to the bulk retrieval of two of the PMC Article Datasets from our FTP service. The improvements were made to bulk packages which include metadata and full text of articles in XML or plain text formats for the PMC Open Access (OA) Subset and the Author Manuscript Dataset, which combined encompass more than half of the 7 million articles in PMC. To improve the usability of these two datasets, PMC has redesigned the bulk download directory structure and file packages on our FTP service. The new structure includes: baseline packages that contain all articles available in PMC as of the baseline date for each respective dataset or grouping; and daily incremental packages for each respective dataset or grouping that only contain articles that are new to the dataset or that have been updated since the baseline or previous incremental file was created. The PMC Open Access Subset bulk packages have been divided into three groups based on available license terms: Commercial Use Allowed - CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND licenses; Non-Commercial Use Only - CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND licenses; and Other - no machine-readable Creative Commons license, no license, or a custom license. The baseline packages for each of these PMC Open Access Subset usage groups and for the Author Manuscript Dataset have been further divided by PMCID range (e.g., a package with PMC004XXXXXX in its name means that any appropriate articles with PMCIDs falling between PMC4000000 and PMC4999999 are included in the package). The previous bulk download directories and packages were moved to a new temporary location in December 2021 and were deleted on April 1, 2022. This change does NOT impact the individual PMC Open Access Subset article directories and packages on the PMC FTP service, those will remain unchanged. Please also note that the datasets discussed in this update are also now available for retrieval and computing in the cloud. See the PMC FTP Service page for more details. Please send your feedback and share more about how you are using the PMC Article Datasets to pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.