Thanks News Outlets for Getting the PubMed Central Word Out!

How do people find out about PubMed Central?

Some people access NLM’s vast bibliographic resources through our website. Others arrive after a Google search or through platforms such as Ovid MEDLINE. But recently I was reminded that news outlets help people find articles in PubMed Central, too. 

While reading an article about consumer electronics and consumer health, I noticed a link provided by the reporter, which I followed to find the original source material. Low and behold, the link took me back home — to PubMed Central (PMC).

PMC is a free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature here at the National Library of Medicine at NIH. Since its inception in 2000, PMC has grown from comprising only two journals, PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Molecular Biology of the Cell, to an archive of articles from thousands of journals.

Today, PMC contains more than five million full-text records, spanning biomedical and life science research from the late 1700s to the present!

PMC supports the NIH Public Access Policy, ensuring access to publicly-funded biomedical research. It also helps NLM meet one of its fundamental responsibilities, outlined in our 1956 enabling legislation, “to preserve permanently the content of books, periodicals, and other library materials pertinent to medicine.”

PMC is not a publisher and does not publish journal articles itself. Instead, content is added to the archive through collaborations with publishers, scholarly societies, research funders, and international organizations.

In December 2017, we reported that more than one billion articles had been retrieved within a single year. Since then, more than 300,000 articles in PMC now have associated supplemental material, frequently including the data to support their research findings.

Almost two-thirds of the articles come from journals that automatically deposit any article reporting on NIH-funded research or from journals that fall under PMC’s full-participation category. Another 25% or so represents “digitized content,” an important collection of articles that, through a collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, provides online access to thousands of complete back issues of historically significant biomedical journals. And about 10% of the articles are “author manuscripts,” which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in a journal. These manuscripts are deposited directly by authors complying with their funders’ public and open access policy to make funded research results available widely, sometimes after an embargo period.

We’ve long known that PMC is a boon to scholarship and clinical practice, yet I’ve wondered how the general public would find articles in PMC.

Now I know.

Journalists who want to direct readers to the authoritative source of their reporting use PMC to provide the full text of the journal article, bringing the power of NLM to an even wider audience. I’m proud that PMC is viewed as a trusted resource and delighted that we’re reaching the public in this way.