PubMed Central
| Producer | United States National Library of Medicine (United States) |
|---|---|
| Access | |
| Cost | Free |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Medicine |
| Record depth | Index, abstract & full-text |
| Format coverage | Journal articles |
| Links | |
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives publicly accessible full-text scholarly articles that have been published within the biomedical and life sciences journal literature. As one of the major research databases within the suite of resources that have been developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is much more than just a document repository. Submissions into PMC undergo an indexing and formatting procedure which results in enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which all enrich the XML structured data for each article on deposit. Content within PMC can easily be interlinked to many other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to freely discover, read and build upon this portfolio of biomedical knowledge.
PubMed Central should not be confused with PubMed. These are two very different services at their core. While PubMed is a searchable database of biomedical citations and abstracts, the full-text article referenced in the PubMed record will physically reside elsewhere. (Sometimes in print, sometimes online, sometimes free, sometimes behind a toll-wall accessible only to paying subscribers). PubMed Central is a free digital archive of articles, accessible to anyone from anywhere via a basic web browser. The full text of all PubMed Central articles is free to read, with varying provisions for reuse.
As of February 2014[update], the PMC archive contained over 2.9 million articles, with contributions coming directly from publishers or authors depositing their own manuscripts into the repository per the NIH Public Access Policy. Recent data shows that in the past year (Jan 2013 – Jan 2014) author-initiated deposits exceeded 103,000 papers during just this 12-month period. PMC also identifies about 4,000 journals which now participate in some capacity to automatically deposit their published content into the PMC repository. Some participating publishers will delay the release of their articles on PubMed Central for a set time after publication, this is often referred to as an "embargo period", and can range from a few months to a few years depending on the journal. (Embargoes of six to twelve months are the most common).
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