How to use FTP service at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc?

PMC FTP Service at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc allows you to use FTP clients for bulk download, individual article download, and PDF download from PMC Open Access Subset, Author Manuscript Dataset, and Historical OCR Dataset.

PMC FTP Service is divided into 4 groups of files:

1. Bulk download - Provides files for PMC Open Access Subset, Author Manuscript Dataset, and Historical OCR Dataset. For each dataset, baseline files and incremental files are provided for article metadata in both XML and plain text formats.

2. Individual article download - Provides files for PMC Open Access Subset only. Metadata, content, media files, supplementary materials, are provided in XML format and PDF (if present) for each single article

3. PDF download - Provide files for non-commercial use licensed articles in the PMC Open Access Subset only.

4. ID map download - Provides a single file to cross reference any PMC article ID with identifiers such as PubMed IDs, DOIs, and Author Manuscript IDs.

PMC FTP Service can be accessed with Web browsers, FTP client tools, or "curl" command by anyone with no restrictions. For example, you can download a single file with the "curl" command:

fyicenter$ curl https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_file_list.csv > oa_file_list.csv

Or, you can download all entries in a sub-directory with the "lftp" command with 3 parallel threads:

fyicenter$ lftp -c mirror -P=3 ftp://anonymous:anonymous@ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_package/00

⇒ PMC FTP Service - Bulk Download

⇐ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/utils/oa/oa.fcgi - OA Web Service

⇑ PubMed Central (PMC) DOI Database

⇑⇑ DOI - Frequently Asked Questions