For Publishers
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). A publisher may be interested in submitting content to PMC in order to
- increase discoverability of and access to its content;
- ensure a long-term, publicly accessible archive of a journal;
- help authors comply with the policies of funding agencies that require articles to be made available in PMC; or
- comply with the MEDLINE Policy on Indexing Electronic Journals
Submission Options
To support these goals, PMC offers three submission options for publishers to consider:
Journal Participation: A journal deposits the final published version of every article or its NIH-funded articles if the journal meets NLM's standards for inclusion in PMC. Interested journals should review the current Participation Agreements. To learn more, see the PMC Journal Application Process page.
Selective Deposit Participation: A publisher deposits select articles from a collection of MEDLINE journals and/or articles that have support from a PMC-partner or Europe PMC-partner funder. Interested publishers should review the current Selective Deposit Participation Agreement.
Author Manuscript Deposit: A publisher initiates deposit of the author manuscript version of an article to the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system on an author's behalf to support compliance with a number of funder policies (see NIHMS Funders). There are no formal agreements between publishers and NLM for author manuscript deposit. See the NIHMS FAQ for more information.
Participating journals and selective deposit publishers are required to deposit full-text XML for every article and meet PMC's other technical quality requirements. Author manuscript deposit does not require full-text XML.
To be eligible for any of the above options, NLM expects a publisher to conform with guidelines and best practices established by relevant professional publishing organizations. Please see Expectations for PMC Participants on our Policies page for details.
PMC Publisher Services
PMC provides participating journals and publishers access to the Publisher Services website, where a suite of tools and reports are available for applying to PMC, tracking deposits, and obtaining usage statistics. Participants can visit the Publisher Services website for more information.
Stay Current
To stay current on updates to PMC, please subscribe to New in PMC. For additional general and publisher-related information, see the resources linked in the right hand column.