Depositing in PubMed Central and Europe PMC

PubMed comprises citations and abstracts for biomedical literature. It does not contain full text articles, although it may provide links to them.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a repository containing full text for biomedical and life sciences journal articles. Authors with US PMC funders, for example the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), deposit to PMC via the NIH Manuscript Submission System.

Europe PMC (EPMC) is the European equivalent of PMC. Authors with Europe PMC funders deposit via EPMC plus.

Any papers deposited in PMC are discoverable in Europe PMC and vice versa, so you do not need to deposit separately in both. Please note you will need to have funding from one of the listed funding bodies in order to deposit.

Routes to depositing in Europe PMC

Gold (paid-for) open access

If you are funded by MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) or British Heart Foundation (BHF), and you are paying for gold open access, the publisher should send the final version of record of your paper to EPMC once it is published. However, it is the responsibility of the funded author to ensure that the paper meets the requirements, so we recommend checking that the deposit has been made.

Green (self-archiving) open access

If your funder requires deposit in EPMC but you are not paying a fee for gold open access, the author accepted manuscript may be deposited. Some publishers will do this on your behalf, or you may need to do it yourself via Europe PMC plus. 

An administrator can deposit on an author’s behalf, but an author on the paper will need to be named as a reviewer, and they will be notified to log in and check and approve the submission. 

Under Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy (RPOAP) you can make the accepted manuscript available immediately on publication (no embargo) with a CC BY license for publishers who have been notified of our policy. You should first deposit in Spiral via Symplectic. Your funder may require deposit under these terms to meet their open access policy. Check your funder’s policy or our research funders open access policies page for details. A list of publishers notified of RPOAP is available. 

If your publisher has not been notified, contact openaccess@imperial.ac.uk so that we can notify them. If you have arranged for deposit under particular terms via another mechanism, for example by using a rights retention statement, you can deposit under those terms. Otherwise, check for any embargo required by the publisher by searching for the journal in Jisc’s open policy finder. If you need any help determining funder compliance or whether you need to add an embargo, contact the open access team at openaccess@imperial.ac.uk in the Library. 

If the publisher automatically deposits the published version and you also need to deposit the accepted version yourself, you may encounter a message that stops you completing the process. If this happens, you will need to contact the EPMC helpdesk to allow you to complete the submission.

For more information on the two deposit routes, see the How papers get into PMC guide from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the body who developed and maintain PubMed.