Copyright

This page has information about general copyright restrictions that apply to the material that is available through the Europe PMC site. There are also links to some Publisher Specific Copyright Information.

All of the material available through the Europe PMC site is provided by the respective publishers or authors. Almost all of it is protected by U.K. and/or foreign copyright laws, even though Europe PMC provides free access to it (See Public Domain Material below, for exceptions).

The respective copyright holders retain rights for reproduction, redistribution and reuse. Users of Europe PMC 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.

Copyright Statements in Europe PMC

Articles and other material in Europe PMC usually include an explicit copyright statement. In the absence of a copyright statement, users should assume that standard copyright protection applies, unless the article contains an explicit statement to the contrary. In case of doubt, contact the journal publisher to verify the copyright status of an article.

Restrictions on Systematic Downloading of Articles

Crawlers and other automated processes may NOT be used to systematically retrieve batches of articles from the Europe PMC web site. Bulk downloading of articles from the main Europe PMC site, in any way, is prohibited because of copyright restrictions.

Europe PMC has implemented OAI, RESTful, SOAP, and bulk download services that may be used for automated retrieval and downloading of a subset of articles from the Europe PMC archive. These are the only services that may be used for automated downloading of articles in Europe PMC. See the open access subset for information about the articles included. Do not use any other automated processes for bulk downloading, even if you are only retrieving articles from the Europe PMC open access subset.

Articles that are available through the OAI service, the RESTful and SOAP web services, and through bulk download are still protected by copyright, but are distributed under a Creative Commons or similar license that generally allows more liberal use than a traditional copyrighted work. Please refer to the license statement in each article for specific terms of use. The license terms are not identical for all the articles.

Please also note that when an open access fee is levied, some funders require that publishers license this content with a CC-BY license, which allows these articles to be freely copied, distributed, displayed and modified into derivative works by any user. These funders include:

  • Versus Arthritis
  • Austrian Science Fund
  • British Heart Foundation
  • Cancer Research UK
  • Medical Research Council
  • National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement & Reduction of Animals in Research
  • National Institute for Health Research
  • Wellcome
  • Worldwide Cancer Research

These articles are also made available through the RESTful and SOAP web services and OAI service.

Public Domain Material

The following Europe PMC journals are U.S. Government publications:

Articles published in these journals are in the public domain and may be used and reproduced without special permission. However, anyone using the material is requested to properly cite and acknowledge the source. Please note these journals may still contain photographs or illustrations copyrighted by other commercial organizations or individuals that may not be used without obtaining prior approval from the holder of the copyright.

Use these links to different publishers' sites for additional copyright terms that apply to their respective content in Europe PMC.