New to PMC?

PMC is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). It is a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other research funding agencies.

You may also be interested in

• PMC Overview, which provides information on PMC’s core principles.
• FAQs for Publishers
• PMC and Research Funder Policies, which includes an up-to-date list of funders that have implemented policies naming PMC as the repository for their supported research.
• Policies, which provides an overview of key PMC policies, including those on corrections, retractions, systematic downloading of articles, and more.

To stay current on changes and updates to PMC, please subscribe to the New in PMC.

Interested in participating in PMC?

PMC offers publishers a number of ways for publishers to archive their content in PMC.

Before you apply, please review

• How to Participate in PMC, which provides critical information on the PMC application process, including pre-application requirements, Scientific Quality Review, and Technical Requirements.
• How Papers Get Into PMC, which provides an overview of the PMC submission methods, along with additional information on the different participation options.
• Participation Agreements and Options, which includes additional details on the participation options for a publisher or journal.

If a publisher does not want to participate in PMC but wants to support authors who must comply with a PMC-participating funder policy, they can contact nihms-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov for more information on establishing a publisher account in the NIH Manuscript Submission system. NIHMS publisher accounts are reserved for publishers and journals that publish significant volume of research supported by NIH and/or other participating funding agencies.

PMC Publisher Quick Links

Technical requirements and resources

• The PMC Tagging Guidelines describe PubMed Central's preferred XML tagging style for journal article submissions in the NLM Journal Publishing DTD or the NISO JATS Journal Publishing DTD.
• Journal Publishing Tag Set Documentation (NLM and JATS) defines XML elements and attributes that describe the content and metadata of journal articles.
• PMC File Validation Tools includes links to PMC’s XML Validator, Style Checker, PMC Article Previewer, and Math Previewer
• Technical Evaluation - Minimum Requirements should be reviewed closely prior to Technical Evaluation. If a sample file submission fails to meet these minimum requirements, a journal’s application to PMC will be rejected.
• Production Data Requirements outlines PMC's technical expectations for all participating journals and how serious and/or repeat data issues will be addressed.
• File Submission Specifications details PMC’s requirements for depositing files (XML, images, PDF, supplementary data).
• Banner Specifications
  • Full Participation and NIH Portfolio Journals
  • Selective Deposit Collections
• The PMC Publisher Portal allows publishers to submit and track new applications, update their contact information, view and download usage statistics, and check the status of articles for production journals.

Learn more about PMC

• The NCBI Handbook chapter on PMC covers architecture, ingest, retrieval, rendering, PMC International, and more.
• PMC Copyright Notice contains information about general copyright restrictions that apply to the material that is available through PMC.
• Text Mining Collections provides an introduction to collections such as the Open Access Subset.