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NIH Public Access and PMC

What is the connection between PMC and the NIH Public Access Policy?

Since its creation in 2000, PMC has served as a free digital archive of full-text biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Beginning in 2005, PMC has also been the designated repository for papers submitted in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy and for those that fall under similar policies from other funding agencies.

How are NIH-funded articles submitted to PMC?

NIH-funded author accepted manuscripts must be submitted through the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system. The manuscript submission process may be initiated by an author, a principal investigator (PI), a publisher, or another 3rd party, but the approval steps must be completed by the author.

NIH-funded final published articles are supplied to PMC only by journals or publisher programs that have formal PMC participation agreements.

For an overview of different submission methods, see For Authors.

What is the relationship among the following article reference numbers: PMCID, NIHMSID, and PMID?

The PMCID is a unique reference number or identifier that is assigned to every article that is accepted into PMC. The PMCID is also used by recipients of NIH funding to demonstrate compliance with the NIH Public Access policy. The PMCID can be found in both PMC and PubMed.

The NIHMSID is a preliminary article identifier that applies only to manuscripts deposited through the NIHMS system. The NIHMSID is only valid for compliance reporting for 90 days after the publication date of an article. Once the Web version of the NIHMS submission is approved for inclusion in PMC and the corresponding citation is in PubMed, the article will also be assigned a PMCID.

The PMID is a unique reference number for PubMed citations. The PMID is a distinctly different number from the PMCID and is used only for PubMed records. A PMID can be found on a PubMed record, or a corresponding PMC record, if applicable.

I have a PMID. How can I find the corresponding PMCID?

A PMID can be used to find the corresponding PMCID for a citation if these reference identifiers have already been created. You can do this type of search with the PMC ID Converter. The converter will return results only for articles that have been assigned a PMCID.

The PMCID is also posted in PubMed once an article has been successfully processed by PMC.

I have a PMID. How can I find the corresponding NIHMSID?

If you have a PMID and are looking for a corresponding NIHMSID, you can log into the NIHMS system and insert the PMID into the search box in the upper right hand corner. If a manuscript is in the system that has been associated with that PMID, your search will return the corresponding NIHMSID.

Which journals or publishers currently deposit the Final Published Article into PubMed Central (PMC) without embargo?

Journals with an active agreement to deposit all articles can be found in the PMC Journal List, which is available from: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/journals/. As some journals included in the PMC Journal List may embargo public availability of articles, review the specific record associated with the journal of interest to confirm it has a Release Delay of 0 months (Immediate release) that meets Policy requirements and an Agreement Status of Active. Otherwise, you may need to make special arrangements with the journal to remove the embargo on a given article or submit the Author Accepted Manuscript to NIHMS.

A journal or publisher may also deposit select articles in PMC if open access arrangements are made. A list of publishers that provide this service is available from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/about/selectivedeposit/.