PMC Copyright Notice

This page has information about general copyright restrictions that apply to the material that is available through the PubMed Central (PMC) site. There also are links to some Publisher Specific Copyright Information.

All of the material available from the PMC site is provided by the respective publishers or authors. Almost all of it is protected by U.S. and/or foreign copyright laws, even though PMC provides free access to it. (See Public Domain Material below, for one exception.) The respective copyright holders retain rights for reproduction, redistribution and reuse. Users of PMC 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. Transmission, reproduction, or reuse of protected material, beyond that allowed by the fair use principles of the copyright laws, requires the written permission of the copyright owners. U.S. fair use guidelines are available from the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

Copyright Statements in PMC

Articles and other material in PMC usually include an explicit copyright statement. In the absence of a copyright statement, users should assume that standard copyright protection applies, unless the article contains an explicit statement to the contrary. In case of doubt, contact the journal publisher to verify the copyright status of an article.

Restrictions on Systematic Downloading of Articles

Crawlers and other automated processes may NOT be used to systematically retrieve batches of articles from the PMC web site. Bulk downloading of articles from the main PMC web site, in any way, is prohibited because of copyright restrictions.

PMC has two auxiliary services that may be used for automated retrieval and downloading of a special subset of articles from the PMC archive. These two services, the PMC OAI service and the PMC FTP service, are the only services that may be used for automated downloading of articles in PMC. See the PMC Open Access Subset for information about which articles are included in this special subset, and for links to the PMC OAI and FTP services. Do not use any other automated processes for bulk downloading, even if you are only retrieving articles from the PMC Open Access Subset.

Articles that are available through the PMC OAI and FTP services are still protected by copyright but are distributed under a Creative Commons or similar license that generally allows more liberal use 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 the articles.

Public Domain Material

The following PMC journals are U.S. Government publications:

Addiction Science & Clinical Practice
Emerging Infectious Diseases
Preventing Chronic Disease

All material published in these journals is in the public domain and may be used and reproduced without special permission. However, anyone using the material is requested to properly cite and acknowledge the source.

Links to Publisher-Specific Copyright Information

Use these links to certain publishers' sites for additional copyright terms, warranties or disclaimers that apply to their respective content in PMC.

American Society for Microbiology
American Society for Nutrition
CBE—Life Sciences Education (American Society for Cell Biology)
Journal of Cell Biology (Rockefeller University Press)
Journal of Experimental Medicine (Rockefeller University Press)
Journal of General Physiology (Rockefeller University Press)
Molecular Biology of the Cell (American Society for Cell Biology)
National Academy of Sciences
Nucleic Acids Research (Open Access content)
Physical Therapy