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For Publishers
How to Join PMC
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How to Join PMC
This page describes the process for adding a journal to PubMed Central (PMC) and explains what is required of participating journals. Interested publishers should also read the PubMed Central FAQs and the Deposit and Access Policies. Although PMC currently focuses on archiving English-language journals, NLM recognizes the need to include other languages in the archive and intends to do so gradually. For more information, see the FAQ on PMC support for languages other than English.
Participation in PMC is open to any life sciences journal that meets NLM's standards for the archive. A journal must qualify on two levels: the scientific quality of the publication and the technical quality of its digital files.
A journal meets PMC's scientific quality standard if it has been selected for the NLM collection by NLM’s Selection and Acquisitions section. See the NLM Technical Services Division fact sheet for more information about this NLM group and NLM's collection development policy. The PMC Application Process To begin the process, the journal publisher should send an email to pmc@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov indicating what it wishes to include in PMC. For each journal, provide at least:
After a brief review, PMC will inform the publisher whether or not the journal meets PMC's scientific quality standard. For journals that meet this standard, the process will continue as follows:
Journal Setup Requirements The PubMed Central online presentation style allows a journal to maintain a distinct identity, but it also provides consistency of appearance and functionality across all of PubMed Central, for the benefit of users.The journal identity is set by the journal banner at the top of each page and a journal 'watermark' stripe running the length of each page. The journal banner is also used to provide a link (or links) back to the journal's own site. Within the general PMC template, a journal may choose from a number of styles for presenting elements such as references, section headings and certain parts of the article front matter. See the PMC Journal Setup Requirements for details. Do NOT send in any setup information until PMC asks you to do so. PMC Participation Agreements Before a journal is released publicly in PMC, the publisher must complete a formal PubMed Central Participation Agreement with NLM. There are three types of agreements, which correspond to how much content a journal plans to deposit. Click on the links below to get a copy of the respective agreement in Microsoft Word format.
Submitting Citations to PubMed and CrossRef If a publisher wishes, PMC will submit citations to PubMed and/or CrossRef on behalf of a journal. In either case, a citation will be sent automatically on the day that an article becomes available on the PMC public site. Citations usually appear in PubMed the day after they are submitted. PMC will use the publisher's account for CrossRef submissions, because PMC does not have its own CrossRef account. |