Post Thu Sep 25, 2014 9:02 pm

Free copies of things on PubMed Central

Hi all,

As the number of CyTOF-related papers continues to grow, some have asked about a repository of PDFs of the the papers. This is often due to a Cytoforum reader not having access to the particular online journal.

While you can usually get a copy from the corresponding author, we at Cytoforum probably can't do this PDF hosting, due to copyright reasons.


However, I would like to point out that most large funding agencies such as the NIH now require deposition of papers in PubMed Central (PMC), as a free source of publications. They may not be the polished and super-formatted versions that appear on the actual journal website, but they *are* the complete and accepted version of the paper. They may be directly deposited by the journal, or just by the authors. Additionally, some journals and funding agencies allow a delay between publication and this free release. Therefore, there may not be a PMC link for a brand-new article, but in 6 months, there might be.

In most cases, the Pubmed result page for a paper will give the reference (journal, year, etc), the DOI, the PubMed ID (PMID), and finally, if the paper is deposited in PMC, the PubMed Central ID (PMCID; different from PMID). That Pubmed page will usually have a links to both the Journal page, and the PubMed Central page (again, if deposited).


As one example, here's the PubMed page for the Nolan 2011 Science paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21551058

Here's the link to the article on Science's website: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6030/687.long

Here's the link to the article on PMC: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273988/


You can search PMC here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

You can do searches by the standard author/year/keyword. You can also throw a DOI into the search box.


One final comment: funding agency enforcement of deposition policies can be spotty. So, there will definitely be times that you cannot find a PMC copy even for an article from a few years ago.

However, hopefully this will help at least some readers who don't have broad journal access.


Mike