Maintain a local copy of the OA subset
July 30, 2026: Changes to PMC’s Article Dataset Distribution Services Coming Week of August 24, 2026
As announced on February 12, major changes to PMC's Article Dataset Distribution Services are underway.
On or after August 24 the legacy PMC Article Datasets files — including the FTP Service files, the PMC OA Web Service API, and the legacy Cloud Service files on AWS — will no longer be available.
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.
For complete details about this transition, please see the April 13th New in PMC 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.