OAI service

The Europe PMC OAI service, (Europe PMC-OAI) provides access to metadata of all items in the Europe PMC archive, as well as to the full text of a large subset of these items.

Europe PMC-OAI is an implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a standard for retrieving metadata from digital document repositories.  Visit the Open Archives Initiative site for more information about the protocol and other activities of the OAI group.

PMC-OAI supports OAI-PMH version 2.0. It does not support earlier versions of the protocol.

Most of the items in this archive are copyright protected, with copyright held by the author(s) or the depositing journal. In general, the OAI service cannot be used to retrieve the full text of articles in PMC. The only exceptions to this policy are for articles that are in the public domain and those that are made available under an Open Access provision (see the PMC Open Access subset for specifics).

Europe PMC-OAI details

• Base URL: http://europepmc.org/oai.cgi?
• Europe PMC OAI verbs
• Europe PMC metadata formats
• Europe PMC sets

Access to full text

• Use the metadataPrefix =pmc to get the full text.
  e.g. http://europepmc.org/oai.cgi?verb=ListRecords&from=2007-10-01&metadataPrefix=pmc
• The parameter set=pmc-open identifies the complete collection of items in PMC for which the full text may be harvested.
  e.g. http://europepmc.org/oai.cgi?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=pmc&set=pmc-open
• Retrieve a record by identifier.
  e.g. http://europepmc.org/oai.cgi?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=pmc&identifier=oai:europepmc.org:2654146

Supported data formats

• The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Journal Archiving and Interchange XML format, for metadata or full-text article records. Complete documentation is available. 
  Use metadataPrefix=pmc_fm for metadata, and metadataPrefix=pmc to get the full text of an item.
• Dublin Core format, for metadata only.  
  Use metadataPrefix=oai_dc.

Automatic Segmentation of Large Result Sets

• If a ListIdentifiers request results in more than 1,000 hits, PMC-OAI will return the first 1,000 with a <resumptionToken> that can be used to get the remaining items. 
• If a ListRecords request results in more than 25 hits for PMC full text, 50 hits for PMC metadata or 250 hits for Dublin Core format metadata, PMC-OAI will return the first 25, 50 or 250 records, respectively, with a <resumptionToken>.