Svoboda | Graniru | BBC Russia | Golosameriki | Facebook

This website requires cookies, and the limited processing of your personal data in order to function. By using the site you are agreeing to this as outlined in our privacy notice and cookie policy.

Open access subset

There are around 9.7 million full text articles in Europe PMC, of which nearly 6.1 million comprise the Europe PMC open access subset.

Copyright

Articles in the open access subset are still protected by copyright, but are made available under a Creative Commons license, or similar, that generally allows more liberal redistribution and reuse than a traditional copyrighted work.

Please refer to the license statement in each article for specific terms of use. The license terms are not identical for all articles in this subset. For an overview of open access Peter Suber's introduction is useful.

Download the open access subset

The open access subset can be downloaded using a variety of Europe PMC services:

Web services

FTP

  • Supplementary files and figures:
  • This directory contains the supplementary files and figures from open access articles in Europe PMC, as well as their full text in XML format. It is updated monthly.
  • Full-text open access Europe PMC articles:
  • Full-text XML open access articles
  • This directory contains all the open access articles available as full-text XML in Europe PMC. It is updated weekly and archived quarterly.
  • Full text PDF open access articles
  • This directory contains all the open access articles available as full-text PDF in Europe PMC. It is updated monthly and archived quarterly.
  • Archived versions of the above:
  • This directory contains quarterly snapshots of the above, as well as the metadata for all full-text articles on Europe PMC. The folders are named as v.YYYY.MM and are captured every 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th month of the year.

Proportion of open access articles in Europe PMC

The chart below shows that each year the proportion of PubMed articles published during that 12 month period and accessible through Europe PMC as full text and/or open access increases. To illustrate: of the articles published in 2005, less than 10% are now available as full text or open access, while of the articles published in 2023 nearly 50% are freely available. To get a current count of articles in the open access subset, search for OPEN_ACCESS:y in Europe PMC, or select the ‘Open Access’ option on the advanced search page.

Note:

  • The majority of the full text articles in Europe PMC are subject to traditional copyright restrictions and are not part of this subset. Read the Europe PMC copyright notice for more information.
  • Some journals use the label "open access" for an article that is available free in its entirety at the time of publication, but is still subject to traditional copyright restrictions. Such articles are not part of this subset.

The open access subset includes articles from a number of publishers' programs, each of which deposits selected articles from a range of journals. A complete list of the publisher programs, with links to the articles, can be found on the Special Collections tab of the PMC Journals List.

In addition to these selective deposit programs, a number of the journals that deposit their complete contents in PubMed Central include some or all their articles in the open access subset. These journals are marked with the symbol Open access in the Journal List.