Are you trying to find out if your article complies with the NIH Public Access policy and/or find a PubMed Central ID (PMCID) for your article? If so, this post describes a simple method for finding the PMCID for an article and thereby verifying Public Access compliance.
First, let’s start with a bit of background. To comply with the NIH Public Access Policy, you need to make sure that your peer-reviewed articles that resulted from NIH funding (full or partial) and that were accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008 are available in the PubMed Central (PMC) database with a PMCID. Please be aware that PMC is not the same as PubMed. PMC is NCBI’s full-text digital archive, while PubMed contains only citations and abstracts. It is not enough for your citation to be available in PubMed with a PubMed ID (PMID); you must have a PMCID to satisfy NIH Public Access policy.
To check that your article has a PMCID and is compliant, proceed as follows:
1) Search PubMed for your article. (If you can’t find your article in PubMed, skip to step 4.)
2) Click on the article title to open the abstract view.
3) Look for the PMCID below the abstract text (see Figure 1).
4) If there is no PMCID shown along with the PMID for the article, or if the article is not in PubMed, please refer to the NIH Public Access submission page for submission methods and additional guidance.
Future blog posts will consider additional common questions regarding the Public Access submission process. Feel free to comment if you have additional questions you would like us to address.
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