Maintain a local copy of the OA subset
April 13, 2026: Update on PMC Article Dataset Distribution Changes
As announced on February 12, major changes to PMC's Article Dataset Distribution Services are underway.
On April 13, all legacy files for the PMC Article Datasets were moved to new temporary directories and prefixes on the PMC FTP and Cloud Services.
- FTP Service: all legacy files were moved to a new directory named "deprecated."
- Cloud Service: all legacy prefixes were updated to add "deprecated" to the prefix. Prefixes for legacy files now begin with //pmc-oa-opendata/deprecated/.
This intentional disruption alerts users to the upcoming changes to the PMC Cloud Service on AWS, while allowing for easy updates to keep existing automated workflows running. We encourage users of the legacy PMC FTP and PMC Cloud Services to begin working with the updated PMC Cloud Service structure and to adjust existing workflows.
All legacy files on the FTP and Cloud Services will be removed in August 2026.
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.