Public Health Emergency Mpox Initiative

Through the Public Health Emergency (PHE) Mpox Initiative, NLM is working with publishers to make mpox and other orthopox-related publications freely and immediately accessible to the public using NLM's PubMed Central and other literature databases, in response to the ongoing health crisis.

This page provides some background on the initiative as well as helpful search strategies for finding relevant articles in NLM's literature databases.

[ Image: Colorized transmission electron micrograph of mpox virus particles (red) cultivated and purified from cell culture. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID]

Background of Initiative

On August 4, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a coordinated call to action with the science and technology leaders of more than 20 countries, requesting that publishers voluntarily make mpox and other orthopox-related publications immediately accessible in appropriate public repositories to support the ongoing public health emergency response efforts. The call specified that these articles be made available with broad reuse rights in both human- and machine-readable format to allow access to full text and metadata.

Publishers (see list of collaborators on this page) have responded to the call by volunteering to make their relevant articles accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) in formats and under license terms that facilitate text mining and secondary analysis. In addition, many other journals and publishers that participate in PMC deposit their mpox-related articles routinely the same way.

Scope of Initiative

PMC is accepting deposit of mpox and other orthopox-related peer-reviewed, biomedical and life science articles (e.g., original research articles, systematic reviews) from publishers that currently submit to PMC. To be in scope, articles should be published in journals that are in the NLM Collection and include a machine-readable license, preferably Creative Commons, that allows for inclusion in the PMC Open Access Subset and clearly indicates terms of reuse.

Publishers are also encouraged to follow the PMC Tagging Guidelines for Data Availability Statements and Data Citations to make the underlying data for the articles as open and discoverable as possible through the literature.

NLM appreciates this opportunity to work with the publishing community to accelerate global efforts to contain the mpox virus. PMC-participating publishers can notify pmc-phe@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov of their interest in collaborating on this effort.

Discovering Mpox Literature in NLM Literature Databases

Use the buttons below to query mpox-related literature in the NLM Literature Databases.