For Developers

PMC hosts a number of important article datasets and makes our APIs and some code available via public code repositories.

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).

E-Utilities is a set of server-side programs that provides a stable interface into all the NCBI databases, including PMC.

We offer several methods for automated retrieval of articles in machine-readable formats.

Subscribe to our low volume push-only listserv for updates on utilities and tools helpful for working with PMC.

APIs

API Name	Description	Documentation
OA	Find citation data, license information, update date, FTP file location and more for Open Access Subset articles that can be downloaded from our FTP site. Base URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/utils/oa/oa.fcgi	Learn more
OAI-PMH	Access metadata for all items in our archive, as well as the full text for a subset of these items that have Creative Commons or similar licenses. Base URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/oai/oai.cgi	Learn more
BioC	Access to the full text of all the Open Access Subset articles in the BioC format XML or JSON Base URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/bionlp/RESTful/pmcoa.cgi	Learn more
PMC ID Converter	Programmatically convert between the various IDs used in our databases, such as PMCIDs, PMIDs, DOIs and more. Base URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/utils/idconv/v1.0/	Learn more
Literature Citation Exporter	Get formatted citations and tag formats, such as MEDLINE or RIS, for journal articles from PubMed and PMC. Base URL: https://api.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/lit/ctxp/v1/pmc/	Learn more

PMC maintains some of our software on GitHub, within the NCBI organization.

The following pages address the most common problems that developers face (as determined by the queries that we've received to our help desk).

Last modified: Tue May 14 2024