Maintain a local copy of the OA subset
February 12, 2026: Changes to PMC Article Datasets Distribution Services Coming in 2026
PMC will make major changes to our Article Dataset Distribution Services in 2026. In August 2026, you will need to access full text article data files through the PMC Cloud Service instead of the PMC FTP Service. This change will provide you with more reliable performance, faster retrieval times, and greater flexibility in retrieving only the types and number of files you wish to work with.
Since this may impact operational workflows, we are providing a transition period from February to August. During this time, the FTP Service, OA Web Service API, and the current PMC Cloud Service files will remain available concurrently with the updated PMC Cloud Service on AWS.
For complete details about this transition, please see the NCBI Insights blog post and our documentation on Accessing PMC Article Datasets Using Amazon Web Services
Often, users are interested in maintaining a local repository with all of the full-text source files from the PMC Open Access Subset. To facilitate that, we provide the OA Web Service. This allows you to query on updated date, and file format, and thus is suitable for use within a cron job that periodically pulls data from the PMC FTP site into a local repository.