Update on Access to Coronavirus-Related Articles in PubMed Central (PMC) COVID-19 Collection After End of Public Health Emergency

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) collaborated with publishers and scholarly societies to expand access to coronavirus-related journal articles in PubMed Central (PMC). Through this collaboration, more than 50 publishers made more than 350,000 coronavirus-related articles accessible under various article-level license terms through the PMC COVID-19 Collection (previously the PMC COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Initiative).

As COVID-19 emergency declarations expired in the United States and around the globe, so too did article-level license terms for use of some of the articles. While most of the content deposited in the PMC COVID-19 Collection remains available in PMC, and all citations will remain searchable in PubMed, some publishers retained the right to remove their content. Several publishers have confirmed that content can remain publicly accessible in the PMC COVID-19 Collection but must be removed from the PMC Open Access Subset distribution channels for bulk distribution and reuse. Others have opted to remove articles from the PMC COVID-19 Collection.

To assist NLM users in navigating these changes:

• A list of PMCIDs for articles that were removed from the PMC Open Access Subset is available in downloadable format at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/covid-19-faq/#removed; the terms allowing for reuse of these articles have expired and downstream users should update their datasets accordingly.
• A list of PMCIDs that were fully removed from the archive is also available in downloadable format from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/covid-19-faq/#removed.
• Articles that are fully removed from PMC will continue to be discoverable in PubMed and be replaced in PMC by a message that provides the reason for the removal and link to a corresponding citation record in PubMed.
  
  
  
  Figure 1: Screenshot of PMC message that provides the reason for removal and link to PubMed.
• Publishers may continue to provide access to affected articles on their websites. Users of NLM literature databases can click on the article DOI (digital object identifier) or LinkOut options to view the record on the publisher’s website.

More information, including a list of publishers and their licensing statuses, is available in the PMC COVID-19 Collection FAQs and on the PMC COVID-19 Collection webpage.