PubMed Central

PubMed Central is a digital repository of open access articles in the life sciences.

PubMed Central (PMC) is housed at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). This archive was founded in 2000 in order to provide a central repository for full text, open access literature in the life sciences.

Most PMC articles are also indexed in [PubMed]. All articles in this archive are accessible in electronic format with no viewing restrictions. The majority of articles can also be distributed and used in excerpt form providing the original citation of the paper is included.

NIH Open Access Mandate

NIH implemented a policy that, starting April 7, 2008, final peer-reviewed manuscripts describing research funded by NIH must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.

NLM DTD

Full text articles are available as downloadable, machine-readable XML files which conform to the NLM's DTD.

Full text XML files are downloadable via FTP as individual files or as a large archive of all of PMC’s holdings.

UK PubMed Central

A version of PubMed Central, based on the US version, was implemented in the United Kingdom, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). It is run in partnership by the British Library, the University of Manchester, and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

NCBI E-utilities

PMC metadata can be accessed using the NCBI E-utilities. Note that an article may have both a PubMed ID and a PMC ID and these IDs are different. Full text articles cannot be retrieved via E-utilities.

PubMed Central Open Archives (PMC-OAI) Service

PMC metadata can also be accessed via PMC-OAI. In addition, the full text of many PMC articles can be retrieved via the base URL http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/oai/oai.cgi.

PMC-OAI is an implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, a standard for retrieving metadata from digital archives.