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PMC Open Access Subset

The PMC Open Access Subset includes millions of journal articles and preprints that are made available under license terms that allow reuse. Not all articles in PMC are available for text mining or other reuse; many are under copyright. Articles in the PMC Open Access Subset are made available under Creative Commons or similar licenses that allow more liberal redistribution and reuse than a traditionally copyrighted work. The PMC Open Access Subset is one part of the PMC Article Datasets.

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  • Not all articles in PMC are available for text mining and other reuse.
  • The PMC Cloud Service, PMC OAI-PMH Service, PMC FTP Service, E-Utilities and BioC API are the only services that may be used for automated retrieval of PMC content. Systematic retrieval (or bulk retrieval) of articles through any other automated process is prohibited.
  • License terms vary. Please refer to the license statement in each article for specific terms of use.
  • Users of this dataset are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder (see the PMC Copyright Notice).

File Packaging

Files for the PMC Open Access Subset are available for automated retrieval in several types of packages:

Details about the files and directory structure are available on the FTP Service page and the Cloud Service page.

Find all Open Access Subset articles in:

Learn about additional search filters that restrict results to certain license types.

Retrieval Methods

The PMC Open Access Subset articles and related metadata are available for retrieval via

Terms of Use

Within the PMC Open Access Subset, there are three groupings by terms of use:

Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative Articles

  • On the FTP Service, articles collected under the Public Health Emergency (PHE) COVID-19 Initiative with with timebound license statements that allow for secondary analysis and reuse for the duration of the global pandemic are included in "Other".
  • On the Cloud Service, distribution of articles in the "Other" group is limited to those articles with a PHE COVID-19 Initiative timebound license statement and are available in the phe_timebound directory. Other articles without standardized licenses in this group are NOT available.

To retrieve the complete PMC Open Access Subset, you must retrieve packages from all of these groupings.

How to Cite

Last modified: Mon July 11 2022