Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs for PubMed Central Canada
FAQs for PubMed Central Canada
What is PubMed Central Canada?
Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, PubMed Central Canada provides a stable, permanent, and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications.
To learn more about PubMed Central Canada, please read About PubMed Central Canada.
Who operates PubMed Central Canada?
PMC Canada is collaborative effort between the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Research (CISTI) in the National Research Council (NRC) Canada. Operational support is provided by the CISTI.
What is the role of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in PMC Canada?
The Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) supports the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health-care system. CIHR’s Policy on Access to Research Outputs requires health researchers to make peer-reviewed publications arising from CIHR-funded research projects freely accessible within six months of publication. CIHR has partnered with the National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information in the creation of PMC Canada. The objective is to develop a stable, permanent, and freely accessible digital archive of the full text of peer-reviewed research publications arising from research funded by CIHR. PMC Canada provides health researchers with a mechanism for complying with CIHR’s access policy, and it gives them access to a wealth of health sciences literature. Authors will have the option to deposit their CIHR-funded articles into PMC Canada and those articles will automatically become part of the US and UK PMC repositories.
How is PubMed Central related to PMC Canada, UKPMC, PMC International, or portable PMC?
PMC International (PMCI) is a collaborative effort between NLM, the publishers whose journal content makes up the PMC archive, and organizations in other countries that share NLM's interest in archiving life sciences literature. The long term goal of PMCI is to create a network of digital archives that can share some or all of their respective locally deposited content with others in the network.
To date, NLM has authorized two PMCI centers, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) and PMC Canada. To learn more about UKPMC, please visit their website. Portable PMC (pPMC) is a version of the PMC software that has been developed by NCBI to enable PMCI sites such as UKPMC to display their content in a presentation style similar to the U. S. PMC site. Read more about PMCI and pPMC.
How is PubMed Central Canada different from PubMed?
PubMed and PubMed Central are databases developed and managed by the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed is a database containing citations and abstracts for millions of articles in the field of life sciences including medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed Central (PMC) is a database containing full text biomedical and life sciences journal articles. All of the articles in PubMed Central appear as citations in PubMed, however not all of the citations in PubMed have corresponding full text entries in PubMed Central.
PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) is based on PubMed Central and is therefore a full text database, which means that it receives all of its journal content directly from the U.S. PMC archive. PMC Canada will also build on PMC through the submission of Canadian funded biomedical and health research.
How current is the material in PubMed Central Canada?
The currency and age of material in PubMed Central Canada varies by journal. Many journals make their content available in PMC Canada as soon as it is published. Others may delay release of content in PMC Canada for anywhere from a few months to more than a year after publication. Most journals provide free access to full text in PMC Canada within a year of publication.
Does PubMed Central Canada contain the complete contents of all the journals that are in its archive?
No. Journals that deposit their articles in PMC Canada fall into one of three categories:
- For several hundred journals, PMC Canada has the complete contents of each issue, starting with the first issue. For the older journals in this group, the back issues of a journal (generally, anything prior to the late 1990s) are available as digitized (scanned) copies of the original print journal.
- For a smaller group of journals, PMC Canada has complete issues and volumes for recent years, but not for all the early years of the journal.
- For still other journals, PMC Canada does not contain any complete issues, just a selection of articles, e.g., just those that are the result of CIHR-funded research, or those that the journal has published as open access articles.
In all three categories, PMC Canada contains a journal's final published version of the respective articles. The PMC Journal List includes information about what content is available from each journal, as well as links to that content.
In addition to the articles from these journals, PMC Canada contains author manuscripts of selected articles from several thousand other journals. See Who may contribute to PubMed Central Canada for more information. These manuscripts are accessible via a PMC Canada search or a link from the corresponding PubMed abstract.
Are there any restrictions on the use of the material in PMC Canada?
Although access to the material in PMC Canada is free, the use of the material still is subject to the copyright and/or related license terms of the respective authors or publishers. See the PMC Canada Copyright Notice for more information.
Does PubMed Central Canada include research that has not been peer reviewed?
No, PubMed Central Canada does not include any unreviewed research articles.
Does PubMed Central Canada include articles written in languages other than English?
Almost all the material now in PMC Canada is in English. A few journals in PMC Canada publish material in more than one language. For instance, CMAJ, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has articles in French and English. In this case, only the English material appears in PMC Canada's primary presentation of an article — the HTML full-text display. However, the journal's PDF version of the article, which is also available in PMC Canada, may contain material in French as well as English. For older issues of the journal, which have been scanned under NLM's digitization program, PMC Canada has the complete contents of each issue. That includes articles published exclusively in French.
In order to provide fuller coverage of non-English language material, PMC Canada must be able to ensure proper validation of the archival XML record in these languages. NLM is considering possible collaborations with national agencies in other countries, as well as other methods, to obtain the non-English language expertise needed to provide an adequate level of quality control for the PMC Canada archive.
Who may contribute to PubMed Central Canada?
PMC Canada supports CIHR's Policy on Access to Research Outputs, under which grant recipients are required to ensure that their peer reviewed publications are freely accessible online within six months of publication. Later this year PMC Canada will launch a manuscript submission system to enable CIHR-funded researchers to deposit articles that are accepted for publication by peer reviewed journals.
How will PMC Canada address issues of copyright? Will authors still need to pay for open-access?
All of the material available through the PubMed Central Canada site is provided by the respective publishers or authors. Almost all of it is protected by Canadian and/or foreign copyright laws, even though PMC Canada provides free access to it. The respective copyright holders retain rights for reproduction, redistribution and reuse. Users of PMC Canada are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder. Transmission, reproduction, or reuse of protected material, beyond that allowed by the fair use principles of the copyright laws, requires the written permission of the copyright owners. For more information please read the PMC Canada Copyright Notice.
PMC Canada is an archive and is not a publisher. Articles must be published or accepted for publication prior to being submitted into PMC Canada. It is the responsibility of the author to meet the publisher requirements in order to get an article published. How can my organization partner with PubMed Central Canada?
Our aim is to grow PubMed Central Canada into a premier public access resource of Canadian supported health research findings. To maximize the value of this Canadian-based public access archive, we wish to collaborate with other Canadian funders of health research who have committed to providing public access to their health research findings. For more information, please visit the PMC Canada partners page.
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FAQs