Open access subset

There are around 0 full text articles in Europe PMC, of which nearly 0 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

  • 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.
  • 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.

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 are now available as full text or open access, while of the articles published in 2023 nearly 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.