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Medical Journal
15th Jan, 2026
PubMed
The NCBI Handbook, 2nd Edition was released on November 14 and is now searchable in Bookshelf. The handbook features an updated section on PMC, which includes information on article retrieval, data processing, and PMC tools and utilities. Other PMC-related literature sections that have been updated include Bookshelf, the NIH Manuscript Submission System and the NLM DTD.
As of February 21, 2014, PMC became home to three million articles! As listed on our home page, the content has been provided in part by 1441 full participation journals, 277 NIH Portfolio journals and 2470 selective deposit journals. For related information on PMC milestones, see these announcements from 2007 and 2010, respectively.
PMC is happy to announce the addition of a citation exporter feature. This feature makes it easy to retrieve either styled citations that you can copy/paste into your manuscripts, or to download them into a format compatible with your bibliographic reference manager software. When viewing an Entrez search results page, each result summary will now include a "Citation" link. When, clicked, this will open a pop-up window that you can use to easily copy/paste citations formatted in one of three popular styles: AMA (American Medical Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), or APA (American Psychological Association). In addition, the box has links at the bottom that can be used to download the citation information in one of three machine-readable formats, which most bibliographic reference management software can import. The same citation box can also be invoked from an individual article, either in classic view (with the "Citation" link among the list of formats) or the PubReader view, by clicking on the citation information just below the article title in the banner. These human-readable styled citations, and machine-readable formats, will be available through a public API, and we will be providing more details about that in another announcement, on the pmc-utils-announce mailing list. Please subscribe to that list if you are interested.
In order to facilitate text and data mining for articles in the Open Access Subset, we are now providing plain text files for those articles on our FTP site. These files contain the full text of the article, extracted either from the XML source files, or (for those articles that don't have XML) the PDF files. Users are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder (see the PMC Copyright Notice ). These text files are bundled in gzipped archives. Note that these files are quite large (each greater than one gigabyte). They are available for download as: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.0-9A-B.tar.gz ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.C-H.tar.gz ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.I-N.tar.gz ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.O-Z.tar.gz These files are updated every week, on Saturday. For more information, see the Bulk Packages of OA Articles section of our FTP Service page.
PMC includes some journals published by US government agencies that make their articles available under a Creative Commons CC0 (public domain) license. Some other journals also apply a CC0 license to selected articles in PMC. All these articles may be used and reproduced without special permission. However, anyone using the material is requested to properly cite and acknowledge the source. You may now search for CC0 articles by using special filters in both PMC ( cc0 license[filter] ) and PubMed ( pmc cc0 license[filter] ). These filters are based on license information that is provided to PMC by publishers and encoded as machine-readable identifiers in the source XML of each article. For more information, see the FAQ titled How do I search for articles by Creative Commons license? page. Please bear in mind that these articles, although made available under a CC0 license, may still contain photographs or illustrations copyrighted by other commercial organizations or individuals that may not be used without obtaining prior approval from the holder of the copyright.
The PMC Overview and FAQ have been updated to provide more information on the Scientific Quality Review Process for journals that apply to participate in PMC. In 2014, PMC implemented a scientific and editorial quality review procedure whereby expert consultants from outside the National Library of Medicine (NLM) conduct an independent review of journals seeking to participate in PMC. This was in response to a significant increase in new publishers and journals applying to participate in PMC, many of which are unknown to NLM in terms of quality and publishing practices. The independent review, which was approved by the PMC National Advisory Committee (see minutes from June 10, 2014), follows an assessment by NLM that the journal meets NLM's criteria for its collection, as outlined in the Collection Development Manual. PMC also recently updated the minimum requirement on the number of substantive, peer-reviewed articles needed before a journal can apply to PMC. The new 25-article minimum ensures that the reviewers have a sufficient amount of content on which to base their recommendation for inclusion in PMC. The new minimum article requirement takes effect on January 1, 2016. Publishers are encouraged to use the 25-article minimum as a guideline in the interim when submitting applications.
NIH-supported scientists have made over 300,000 author manuscripts available in PMC. Now NIH is making these papers accessible to the public in a format that will allow robust text analyses. You can download the PMC collection of NIH-supported author manuscripts as a package in either XML or plain-text format at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/manuscript/. The collection encompasses all NIH manuscripts posted to PMC that were published in July 2008 or later. While the public can access the manuscripts' full text and accompanying figures, tables, and multimedia via the PMC website, the newly available XML and plain-text files include full text only. In addition to text mining, the files may be used consistent with the principles of fair use under copyright law. Please note that these author manuscript files are not part of the PMC Open Access Subset. The NIH Office of Extramural Research developed this resource to increase the impact of NIH funding. Through this collection, scientists will be able to analyze these manuscripts, further apply NIH research findings, and generate new discoveries. For more information, please visit the PMC author manuscript collection webpage.
Last month marked the third anniversary of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum directing Federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development (R&D) expenditures to develop plans for increasing public access to the results of the research they support, including scholarly publications. As a result of this directive, in 2015, PMC started providing support as a public access repository for funding agencies beyond the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). As of March 2015, the following additional agencies are using the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system to facilitate the deposit in PMC of peer-reviewed manuscripts that fall under their public access policies: Agency for Healthcare Research Quality (AHRQ/HHS) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC/HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA/HHS), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Additionally, the following additional HHS and other federal agencies have announced public access plans and committed to using PMC as the repository for agency-funded publications: Administration for Community Living (ACL/HHS) Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR/HHS) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) PMC will continue to update the list of participating funding agencies at Public Access and PMC as these agencies begin implementation of their policies. More information about the current status of public access expansion as a result of the OSTP memo can be found on the White House blog.
PMC has reorganized its FTP Service site for users interested in accessing the PMC Article Datasets, which include the original Open Access (OA) Subset. New top-level FTP directories help users quickly locate the content available for bulk download that best suits their research needs. These directories include: oa_package - article packages for individual OA articles oa_pdf - individual PDFs for OA articles oa_bulk - bulk packages of text from OA articles manuscript - author manuscripts collected under a funding agency's public access policy historical_ocr - select OCR texts from the PMC Back Issue Digitization project To make it easier for users to identify and comply with the different licenses that apply to OA articles, new file lists have been created and the file lists for individual OA articles now include a "license-type" field for each article. Similarly, the bulk packages of OA article text have been divided into two sets. One set comprises articles that may be used for commercial purposes (the Commercial Use Collection); the other contains articles that can be used only for non-commercial purposes. See the Open Access Subset page for details. To allow regular users to transition to the new arrangement, the previous arrangement of files and directories will be maintained in parallel for at least four weeks (i.e., until the end of August 2016).
As of August 2016, PMC is home to four million articles! To make this wealth of full-text content easier to navigate, PMC has rolled out a few updates: 1) Search Result Filters On all search results pages, you will now see filters (similar to PubMed's filters) on the left-hand side that allow you to filter your results by article attributes, publication date, research funder, and search fields. These filters replace the Limits page and allow you to more readily: find open access articles (PMC has more than 1.35 million open access articles that can be reused according to their license statements), explore PMC's rich historical content from NLM's back issue digitization project, browse research supported by PMC-participating funding organizations (click "Customize" to view additional funder options), and much more. You can now also quickly add articles that are under a 12-month or less embargo in PMC to your search results by selecting the "Include embargoed articles" filter option under Text Availability. See the PMC User Guide for more information on these filters. 2) Reference List Display Using related article data available in PMC, articles that cite papers that have been either retracted or named in a Findings of Research Misconduct issued by the HHS Office of Research Integrity and not yet retracted will now include a red hyperlink to the relevant notice directly from the article's reference list. This update will help users more easily identify post-publication updates to existing research.
A large-scale update of the file names used for articles available via the PMC FTP service for bulk download was undertaken in early January 2017. The new file naming convention is PMCID-based (e.g., PMC4855680.tar.gz) rather than being built from article citation data (i.e., journal abbreviation_pub date_volume_issue_page). This update was made following user reports that the previous naming convention was resulting in missing contents in cases where citation data was duplicated across multiple articles. The new convention will ensure that file names are unique and that the corpus available via the FTP service is complete.
Since March 2016, the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system has added support for researchers from the following federal agencies to deposit in PMC any manuscripts that fall under the agency's public access policy: Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR/HHS; intramural only at this time) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; intramural only at this time) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA; intramural/civil servants and grantees) Manuscript deposit support for all Administration for Community Living (ACL/HHS) researchers will be available in NIHMS by October 2017 and for Department of Homeland Security researchers in early 2018. Additionally, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Open Access Policy now requires their grantees to make their published research results available in PMC immediately upon publication under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Manuscript deposit support is not provided in NIHMS for Gates-funded researchers; rather the final published version of any Gates-funded article is to be deposited directly to PMC by the publisher or a funder-supported data provider without author involvement. More information on this open access policy is available on the Gates Foundation website. PMC will continue to update the list of participating funding agencies at Public Access and PMC as support is implemented.
In response to the growing interest in the availability of data associated with articles, PMC is reviewing current practices around data and seeking feedback on how to best serve the data needs of the research community. As part of these efforts, the PMC policy statement on supplementary data was recently updated to more clearly articulate the requirement that any supplementary data (images, tables, video, or other documents / files) that are associated with an article must be deposited in PMC with an article. The search filter " hassuppdata " can be used in PMC to discover records with associated supplementary data files. In addition to providing supplementary data with an article, NLM is also encouraging journals and authors to make research data available in a public repository and include the relevant data citation(s) in the paper. Guidance for PMC data providers on tagging data citations is available in the Tagging Guidelines. This guidance is based on the JATS4R recommendations on data citations. Starting this month, the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system will also accept deposits of small datasets accompanying deposits of funded author manuscripts for inclusion of PMC. (Guidance for authors is available in the NIHMS FAQ.) If you have suggestions on future directions in data for PMC to consider, please let us know at pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
PMC Canada, sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), with operational support provided by the National Research Council (NRC), has been a valued partner in the PMC International network since 2009. CIHR and NRC have now notified NLM of their decision to permanently take PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) offline on February 23, 2018. Details of this decision are available on the PMC Canada website. The decision to decommission PMC Canada does not affect the status or operations of NIH's PubMed Central (US) or Europe PubMed Central. PMC Canada content will remain in the PMC archive and be publicly searchable on NLM's PubMed Central (US) and through Europe PMC. CIHR researchers who publish in journals that deposit their articles directly into NIH's PubMed Central or deposit manuscripts co-funded with current PMC-participating funders will continue to be considered in compliance with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. NIH and NLM have appreciated our cooperation with CIHR and NRC over the last several years and will continue to identify new opportunities to work together to support open access and research excellence.
As we kick off a new year, we wanted to take this opportunity to look back on 2017, which was a milestone year for PMC. Last year, PMC made nearly half a million articles available for the public to access with the support of participating journals, publisher programs, and research funders. Also, in addition to expanding support for public access to research results and the linking of those results to the underlying dataset(s), PMC released several other policy and resource updates. These include: Clearer statement of scope for PMC (see also the updated entry in the NLM Collection Development Manual for "Journals" ); Guidance for journals on reapplying to PMC; Policy statements on the scientific, editorial, and technical standards for PMC (including details on the journal reevaluation process), the supply of back content, the eligibility of non-English language journals, and the maintenance of publishing schedules; Production data requirements for PMC-participating journals; and Major update to the PMC Article Previewer, a tool that allows publishers to see or "preview" how articles will appear in PMC and resolve data problems prior to submission. In September, NLM recognized the achievements to date in the Wellcome Trust and NLM Biomedical Journal Digitization project, which has added a dozen new historical titles and more than a half million pages to the PMC archive. The PMC archive now includes content from as far back as the late 18th century. Many thanks all our participants and users for a wonderful year!
Surgery
Journal of the American Medical Association
Wiley
Medical News
phys.org
Nature Medicine's Advance Online Publication (AOP) table of contents.
Regional Health – Americas
The Lancet
