Tag Archives: pubmed central

Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy

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The new NIH Public Access Policy has been in effect for a couple of months, requiring that NIH-funded research be made available in PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication.

How can you comply?

Our library guide walks you through some of the key steps you need to do as an author, from strategically selecting where to publish, publisher-specific policies, and when and how to deposit the author-accepted manuscript. In addition, a recent webinar from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Savitt Medical Library highlighted some of the details of this policy change:

  • The new policy applies to “manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025.” Compliance will be tracked through My Bibliography based on the earliest publication date in PubMed.

  • If the published work is based on a grant that ended before July 1, 2025, it is not subject to the updated policy.

  • Neither publishing open access nor posting your manuscript to a preprint server counts as compliance.

The webinar and our guide offer useful advice that may help you select a journal to target for publication:

  • The PMC journal list includes key information from journals that currently or previously agreed to deposit the final published version of NIH-funded articles directly to PMC. You can search for journals based on their agreement status and embargo period.

  • The agreement status remains the most up-to-date piece of information listed. If a journal is listed as “no longer participating,” no further articles are being deposited into PMC, regardless of previous agreements.

    Filters available when searching the PubMed Central journal list, at right.

    • After searching the PMC journal list, visiting our frequently updated publisher policy list, or viewing the website of the journal in question, reaching out to the journal to confirm the policy in writing remains a best practice.

    Still have questions? Reach out to the Library and we will do our best to advise you.

    Updated PubMed Central (PMC) Website

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    In October 2024, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) updated the PubMed Central (PMC) website. Apart from the most obvious change – the URL of the PMC homepage is now pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – most of these important modernization updates are related to the digital accessibility of the PMC website and designed to ensure its reliability and sustainability into the future.

    More specifically, from PubMed Central (PMC) Transitions to Updated Website – NCBI Insights:

    “The updated website runs on cloud services to ensure the website’s long-term sustainability and reliability. It also incorporates U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) components and design principles to improve PMC’s readability and accessibility, whether you are visiting on a desktop computer, mobile device, or accessing its content using assistive technology.” 

    For example, the PMC article display has been tweaked to improve its readability:

    See this section of the PMC User Guide to learn more about the key features and functionality available both on the desktop version and mobile version article displays.

    To read about the great work NLM is doing to ensure equitable access to its products – see:
    The Future of PubMed Central: Publicly Accessible, Digitally Equitable, Universally Valuable – NLM Musings from the Mezzanine

    Questions?  Ask Us at the MSK Library!

    Systematic Bulk Downloading of Articles from PubMed Central (PMC)

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    In this era of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), there is increased interest in accessing large numbers of full-text articles to train deep learning models and/or evaluate their performance. The U. S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)’s PubMed Central (PMC) full-text article repository is a popular choice with AI/ML researchers who are often looking for a free, openly accessible source of the scholarly biomedical literature. For a recent example of research carried out using the PMC Open Access Subset, see PMID: 37094464:

    Although the NLM is generally accommodating of researchers using and even building upon all the tools and resources that it develops and supports, there is an expectation on the part of NLM that researchers will work within their rules and restrictions. Anyone interested in “automated retrieval of articles in machine-readable formats in PubMed Central (PMC)” is encouraged to explore the “several large datasets of journal articles and other scientific publications made available for retrieval under license terms that generally allow for more liberal redistribution and reuse than a traditional copyrighted work (e.g., Creative Commons licenses)”. However, there are “Restrictions on the Systematic Downloading of Articles”– see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/tools/textmining/. 

    When researchers try to bulk download a large amount of content via the regular PMC web interface on their own, PMC’s systems notice the increased activity and block the IP range(s) responsible as this is in violation of the terms of the PMC Copyright Notice which states that “Systematic downloading of batches of articles from the main PMC web site, in any way, is prohibited because of copyright restrictions.”

    From: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/copyright/:

    PMC makes certain subsets of articles (i.e., the PMC Article Datasets) accessible through auxiliary services that may be used for automated retrieval and downloading. These are:

    These services are the only services that may be used for this purpose. Do not use any other automated processes for downloading articles, even if you are only retrieving articles from the PMC Article Datasets (including the PMC Open Access Subset).

    Questions? Be sure to Ask Us at the MSK Library!