One important way the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is responding to the ongoing public health emergency is through the COVID-19 Initiative. This public-private cooperation between NLM and more than 50 scholarly publishers and societies allows you to access over 100,000 articles on COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses through PubMed Central (PMC). This collection includes recently published discoveries, a history of coronavirus reports for comparison, international (globally comprehensive) content, and captures the breadth of research, analysis, and commentary. We make these articles available in human- and machine-readable formats to support public accessibility and analysis by researchers.

You can search this public health emergency collection in PMC or download the collection through the PMC Open Access Subset. The collection spans:

• • More than half a century of research, including articles from the 1960s through the present (more than 60% of the articles included thus far were published in 2020 (Figure 1, top panel);
  •  Several languages, including content in English (~95%), German, French, and Spanish;
  •  Many publication types, more than half of them research or review articles (Figure 1, bottom panel).

Figure 1. The Public Health Emergency Collection articles by decade of publication (top panel) and by publication type (bottom panel).

People have viewed or downloaded articles in this PMC collection more than 80 million times since March reflecting the great demand for such an open and centralized collection. Artificial intelligence organizations, such as the Allen Institute for AI — builders of the COVID-19 Research Dataset (CORD-19), have also used the collection to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.

To learn more about the initiative and NLM’s collaborators, see the Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative overview and related FAQs.

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