PubMed Central

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals.

As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository.

Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article.

[1] Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

[3] PubMed Central is a free digital archive of full articles, accessible to anyone from anywhere via a web browser (with varying provisions for reuse).

Conversely, although PubMed is a searchable database of biomedical citations and abstracts, the full-text article resides elsewhere (in print or online, free or behind a subscriber paywall).

As of December 2018[update], the PMC archive contained over 5.2 million articles,[4] with contributions coming from publishers or authors depositing their manuscripts into the repository per the NIH Public Access Policy.

[6] Some publishers delay the release of their articles on PubMed Central for a set time after publication, referred to as an "embargo period", ranging from a few months to a few years depending on the journal.

[8] The idea came to him "abruptly" in December 1998, inspired by the early use of arXiv for preprints after a presentation from Pat Brown of Stanford and David Lipman, director of NCBI:[9][10] But my views broadened abruptly one morning in December of 1998 when I met Pat Brown for coffee, at the café that was formerly the famed Tassajara Bakery, on the corner of Cole and Parnassus, during a visit to San Francisco.

[...] The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced that a radical restructuring of methods for publishing, transmitting, storing, and using biomedical research reports might be possible and beneficial.

In a spirit of enthusiasm and political innocence, I wrote a lengthy manifesto, proposing the creation of an NIH-supported online system, called E-biomed.The goal of E-biomed was to provide free access to all biomedical research.

Varmus intended to realize the new possibilities presented by communicating scientific results digitally, imagining continuous conversation about published work, versioned documents, and enriched "layered" formats allowing for multiple levels of detail.

At the October 1999 STM Annual Frankfurt Conference, several publishers led by Springer-Verlag reached a hurried conference room consensus to launch their competitor prototype:[13] At the Board meeting of the STM association, held the afternoon of Monday, October 11, before the fair's Wednesday opening, discussion focused on an emerging U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) initiative called E-Biomed (later PubMed Central) that had been proposed by Harold Varmus of the National Institutes of Health in the spring of 1999.

Organizations such as AIP and IOP (Institute of Physics) had begun to link to each other's publications, and the impossibility of replicating such one-off arrangements across the industry was obvious.

Under pressure from vigorous lobbying from commercial publishers and scientific societies who feared for lost profits,[14] NIH officials announced a revised PubMed Central proposal in August 1999.

When an actual item such as an article is reached, PubMed Central converts the NLM markup to HTML for delivery, and provides links to related data objects.

[29][30] A 2013 analysis found strong evidence that public repositories of published articles were responsible for "drawing significant numbers of readers away from journal websites" and that "the effect of PMC is growing over time".

[33] The NIH policy and open access repository work has inspired a 2013 presidential directive which has sparked action in other federal agencies as well.