New Filters for Creative Commons Articles

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are types of copyright licenses that allow free distribution of a work. PubMed Central (PMC), the NLM archive of full text journal articles, includes articles that have a Creative Commons license or are in the public domain. The latter covers those articles authored by staff of U.S. government agencies.

NLM now offers a filter for both PubMed Central and PubMed to find articles with unrestricted Creative Commons or public domain (CC0) licenses:

PubMed Central: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=cc0+license%5Bfilter%5D or add cc0 license[filter] to your search

PubMed: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=pmc+cc0+license%5Bfilter%5D or add pmc cc0 license[filter] to your search

These filters are based on license information that is provided to PubMed Central by publishers. There are many more articles cited in PubMed but not deposited in PMC that have CC0 licenses, but that information is not part of PubMed.

You can view the detailed copyright information for an article in PubMed Central by clicking on Copyright and License Information at the top (see Figure 1):

For more information, see the PubMed Central Open Access Subset page.

You may use and reproduce these articles without special permission. It is requested that you properly cite and acknowledge the source.

Please bear in mind that these articles, although made available under a CC0 license, 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.