August 22, 2012 — JATS Becomes NISO Standard

The Journal Archiving Tag Suite(JATS), known formerly as the NLM DTD, has now been officially adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/ National Information Standards Organization (NISO) standard. According to the press release from NISO, "JATS provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content by preserving the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered." For more information, see NISO Publishes Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standard.

July 13, 2012 — A Facelift for PMC

PMC has recently undergone another redesign to improve the look and feel and functionality of the site, featuring more white space, cleaner lines and enhanced navigation on its article, issue, and journal archive pages. For more information, see the article in the July-August 2012 issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

July 12, 2012 — New Version of PMC Help is Released

The PMC user's guide, PMC Help has been updated to include new and improved information on navigating the site as well as descriptions and instructions on using the new search functions, such as Limits and Advanced Search Builder. Further updates will also be forthcoming.

March 26, 2012 — JATS-Con Dates Announced for 2012!

The third annual Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) will be held on October 16 and 17, 2012 on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. JATS-Con is a conference for users of the NISO Z39.96 Journal Article Tag Suite: that is, users of any of the NLM DTDs. JATS-Con is a peer-reviewed conference with a broad range of content on the Tag Suite from the technical to publishing theory — and the latest news on the Tag Suite. For more information, see JATS-Con.

February 29, 2012 — PMC Advisory Committee Appoints New Members

The following new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Martha Bedard, Dean of Libraries at the University of New Mexico; and Lorraine Haricombe, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas and a member of SPARC's board. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for June 19, 2012. For more information, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

September 12, 2011 — JATS-Con is Coming!

The second annual Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) will be held on September 26 and 27, 2011, at the Natcher Conference Center on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The 2011 conference will feature a host of presenters who will discuss topics ranging from Best Practices to PMC Tagging Guidelines. For more information on the conference and the program, see JATS-Con.

June 20, 2011 — The PMC 10th Anniversary Video is now on YouTube!

A video celebrating PMC's first decade is now available for viewing on the NCBI YouTube Channel. The PMC 10th Anniversary Video can also be found on the regular YouTube site.

June 14, 2011 — PMC Advisory Committee to Meet at NLM

The PMC Advisory Committee will hold its annual meeting at the National Library of Medicine on Friday, June 17, 2011 from 9:30 am to 3 pm. Four new committee members will be joining the group, see New Members Appointed to PMC Advisory Committee. Presentations will include discussions relating to the NIH Public Access policy and a viewing of the PMC 10th Anniversary video. For more information, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

May 26, 2011 — A Brand New Look for PMC!

PMC has gotten a facelift-- or more accurately, an interface-lift! The home page, search page and other PMC informational pages have all undergone an overhaul, in order to provide users with easier navigation, enhanced features, and a look and feel that is more consistent with other recently updated NCBI sites, such as PubMed and Bookshelf. Additional new features and updates will be coming soon. For more information on navigating the new site, see the article in the July-August issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

February 28, 2011 — Ten Years After: PMC Milestone Featured in NLM in Focus!

PMC marked its 10th anniversary in 2010 with a celebratory event at its annual Advisory Committee meeting, held at the National Library of Medicine last June. This milestone event was recently featured in the February 17th edition of NLM In Focus, in an article NLM Milestones: The Hits Just Keep on Coming. For more information on the ten years of PMC, see the article in the May-June issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

February 17, 2011 — New Members Appointed to PMC Advisory Committee

Four new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Philip Bourne, of the University of California, San Diego; Sophia Colamarino, an independent consultant in San Francisco; Paul Courant, of the University of Michigan; and Patricia Thibodeau, of Duke University. Each member will serve a 4-year term. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for Friday, June 17, 2011. For more information on the committee, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

September 14, 2010 — A New Look and Feel for PMC's Public Access Page

The Public Access & PMC page has been redesigned for greater clarity and usability. In addition to including a list of the FAQs at the top, the new page features a table illustrating all the ways to find various reference numbers for an article: the PMID, NIHMSID, and most important, the PMCID, which must be used to demonstrate compliance in terms of the NIH Public Access Policy.

June 25, 2010 — PMC Hits Two Million Mark!!

It's official—PMC has just become home to two million articles! The record-breaking article, which came from the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics, became publicly available in the PMC archive on June 23. This new PMC milestone has occurred almost three years to the day since PMC reached its last one: the one-million article mark in June 2007. See also: PubMed Central Hits One Million Article Mark.

June 17, 2010 — First-Ever Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) to be Held in November 2010

PMC is pleased to announce the first of what we hope will be an annual series of conferences for users of the Journal Article Tag Suite, that is, for users of any of the “NLM DTDs”. The Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) is a peer-reviewed conference that will feature a broad range of content on the Tag Suite—from the technical components to publishing theory—as well as the latest news on the Tag Suite. The conference will be hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland on November 1 & 2, 2010.

For more information on the conference, see http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con.

Note: There is no charge for the conference; however, space is limited so preregistration is required.

April 29, 2010 — PMC Canada's Manuscript Submission System Goes Live!

The PMC Canada manuscript submission system was released on April 28, 2010. The system will enable researchers funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to deposit their peer-reviewed research publications, in compliance with CIHR's Policy on Access to Research Outputs.

February 24, 2010 — New Members for PMC Advisory Committee

Four new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, Jan Fassler of the University of Iowa, Ivy Anderson of the California Digital Library, and Delores Meglio from the Knovel Corporation. Each member will serve a 4-year term. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for June 4, 2010. For more information on the committee, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

November 16, 2009 — New URLs in PMC

PMC recently redesigned its URL format to allow for easier usability as well as consistency across the NCBI site. To implement this change, we moved the previous site, www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov, into the NCBI domain as a sub-site. You can now access the PMC home page at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc.

The primary advantage of the new format is to enable the PMC site to become more fully integrated with other NCBI resources. The new URLs are also more user-friendly—they no longer include technology-driven terminology, such as CGI script names and file extensions (Figure 1).

Figure 1—Old URL for Journal Page with CGI Script Name

Instead, note that after the NCBI/PMC address, the URL first identifies the type of resource, e.g., the PMC journal list, with subsequent identification for a particular subset of that resource—in this case, the journal number (Figure 2).

Figure 2—New URL for Journal Page with Journal Number

Additionally, you will have greater flexibility in accessing particular types of material because, in a number of cases, more than one URL can be used for the same resource. In these instances, one URL is considered to be canonical, or primary; however, using any of the ancillary URLs for that resource will redirect you back to the canonical one. For example (see Figure 3), although the first URL, which represents the PMCID, is considered to be the canonical URL, you may also access the article by using other identifiers, such as the pmid, doi, or the issn-volume-issue-page (ivip).

Figure 3—Canonical and Ancillary URLs for the Same Full-Text Article

Finally, with the roll-out of these more stable and standardized URLs, as in the table below (Figure 4), you will also find it easier to modify the web addresses in your browser. Note that the canonical URL is given first and is in bold; the ancillary URLs are listed below it.

Figure 4—Table Display of all New URLs

Although the new URLs are firmly in place, please also note that we haven't completely discarded the old to bring in the new. If you do use an old URL, it's not a problem. Your browser will be redirected to the new location.

October 28, 2009 — PMC Now Offers a “Preview” Table of Contents for Embargoed Issues

For any journal issue that has at least one open access or early access article, PMC is now displaying the table of contents (TOC) in advance of the whole issue becoming available. Not to worry, though—only those articles specified for early release are immediately viewable in PMC. As consistent with the terms of access in the journal agreement, the other articles will only become available on their specified release date, as shown in the TOC below.

The journal's accessiblity, as indicated on the PMC Journal list also has not changed; for example, Plant Physiology's embargo period is still 12 months. What has changed is that the issues with “preview” TOCs now additionally appear on the journal's archive page. Publishers and others can rest assured, however, that no access terms for any journal have been changed with the unveiling of this new format.

October 21, 2009 — PMC Canada is Launched!

The newest addition to the PMC International effort, PubMed Central Canada has now been made public. Stay tuned for the launch of PMC Canada's manuscript submission system later this year.

October 1, 2009 — PMC Adds New Page on Public Access

A new page, Public Access & PMC, has now been added to the About PMC section of the PubMed Central site. “Public Access & PMC” provides information on the relationship between PMC and the NIH Public Access policy, including the difference between the NIH Public Access journal list and PMC journal list. In particular, authors and publishers should find this new site to be a useful resource.

July 24, 2009 — New Search Function Released

You can now find embargoed articles and their corresponding PMCIDs through a recently released search option in the PMC Entrez database. Using the “Limits” tab, click in the field, “Show both free and embargoed articles” and refine your search by journal, author, date, article type, and/or tag term, as needed. Once you’re on the summary page, click on the “embargoed” tab at the top to find the articles in this category. You can then find the PMCID and date of availability at the bottom of the article citation, as indicated in the example below. Note: The PMC search option only includes articles with an initial embargo of up to 12 months. Articles with an embargo greater than 12 months are not compliant with the NIH Public Access Policy and will appear in search results only when the full text is free in PMC. For more information, see the article in the September-October issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

July 6, 2009 — PMC Canada to Start in Fall 2009

Canada is soon expected to join the international effort to provide access to health research through the PMC International network of digital archives. PMC Canada is the result of a three-way collaborative effort by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). Similar to UK PubMed Central, PMC Canada will include most of the health and life sciences literature available through the U.S. PMC. PMC Canada will also include research resulting from funding through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Components of the new repository will include a bilingual interface as well a manuscript submission system for CIHR researchers. A press release from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is also available at: http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/39788.html.

June 16, 2009 — PMC Advisory Committee Meets at NLM

The most recent meeting of the PMC Advisory Committee was held at the National Library of Medicine on June 15, 2009. The committee meets at least once a year and its members are appointed by the NIH Director from the biomedical information communities and the general public. Dr. Gary Ward, of the Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics at the University of Vermont, has been appointed to serve as Chair of the Committee through January 2011.

May 19, 2009 — New Version of PubMed Central® Journal List Released

PMC released a new and improved journal list on March 31, 2009, after a comprehensive redesign for greater clarity and organization.

The new design not only combines the full-list and tabbed-list views of the previous version but also includes some new or updated features to provide users with a greater overview of the total PMC archive. Looking at this new list, you will find:

1. An Expanded View of PMC journals that includes NIH Portfolio
2. Special Collections
3. A New “Participation Level” Journal Category
4. Hide/Show Display Option for Predecessor Titles
5. Article and Journal Search Feature

For more information, see the complete article in the May-June issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj09/mj09_pmc_redesign.html